We Need To Talk To Our Neighbors About Disasters

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

The go-to advice I hear a lot when fighting fascism is to make connections with those around you. It’s advice I’ve given before, too. As I write in a climate change advice article: “Make a plan to introduce yourself to [your neighbor]. If you haven’t already, knock on their door, say hi, and ask about their days.”

Yet talking and knowing your neighbors is really a shorthand for building community with those who are around you. The goal is to have people in your physical proximity who you can rely on. People, you can ask for help (and vice versa) when you need a package picked up, are short on a particular food, need a kid or pet watched, need a driveway shoveled, and all the other things, both big and small, that we rely on others for.

Where the “talk with your neighbors” advice often falls short is how to develop relationships with the people close to you who you don’t click with. Sometimes, you do say hello to your neighbors, and it doesn’t go well. Their schedule is too busy. They have no similar interests to you. Maybe you just find them annoying. How do you build community, then?

That’s where a disaster plan comes in.

Planning for a disaster is not a solitary affair

Disasters are an inevitable part of life and an increasingly more common one with climate change, and they can potentially be mitigated when you properly prepare for them.

The specifics of those preparations will depend heavily on your local environment and the type of disaster most frequent in your area (e.g., fire, flood, tornado, etc.). It is generally advised that you follow your state or local polity’s recommendations, but even considering this, there are general things you need to decide on, such as:

• Where will you evacuate in the case of said disaster, and how are you getting to that place safely?

• What parts of your home will you need to shut off or reinforce as you flee or huddle inside?

• What items will you store in advance to help with your evacuation or in the event the grid is cut off (see bugout bags)?

These are all great questions to start with (and you can find many more out there). One of the first things suggested with most disaster preparedness is to make an emergency plan to go over how you will navigate your home, work, and neighborhood when a disaster strikes.

Yet, when you go to look up these questions, there is usually a bias toward nuclear families. When we look at FEMA’s preparedness guide, the family is overwhelming front and center: “Understand the risks you and your family may face,” it advises under its first step for preparing for disasters. It also advises you to focus on your community eventually, but in preparing for disasters, it claims, you start with your family's unique needs first.

And that’s a problem because not everyone can start that preparedness alone. Some people live by themselves, either permanently or temporarily. How does a single person hundreds of miles from their family handle a disaster when they are sick or bedridden? How does an elderly person with reduced mobility?

Even if you are the picture of perfect health, what happens when there are logistical issues that require coordination? If, for example, a wildfire is coming in, and you have an adjoining wooden fence with your neighbor, the day of the fire is the worst time to have to confer with them on if they are okay with you chainsawing the fence down so it doesn't bring fire to your property.

Vulnerabilities will inevitably require that you coordinate with those around you, and that doesn't just include family members.

Whether that’s helping with the distribution of sandbags to stop water from rising, checking in on sick and elderly neighbors who might be left to fend for themselves otherwise, or distributing food, much more can be accomplished much more quickly when working in tandem with other people.

Approaching your neighbor

I’ve hopefully made the case for why disaster preparedness requires cooperation with more people than just yourself and your nuclear family. The natural question becomes how to broach the subject with your neighbor so that these preparations can go smoothly.

The scale of this will depend very much on how dense your community is, but the process starts more or less the same. After you have begun a disaster checklist of what you will need to do when a disaster strikes, you will have a sense of some of the areas that overlap with your neighbors. I used the example of a joint fence earlier, but other examples might include a shared wall, a precariously hanging tree or electric pole, a very mediocre elevator in your building, and more.

I would approach your neighbors and talk about your specific concerns with them. For example, saying: “Hey neighbor, we’ve been having a lot of wildfires (disasters) recently, and I am concerned about what will happen if the fence we share ever catches on fire (joint concern). You down to talk about what we should do if that were to ever happen?”

The ideal would be for you to settle on how to share that responsibility. Maybe one of you has a chainsaw and will cut down X feet of the fence leading up to your houses while the other clears the cut-down wood. Whatever the plan may be, make sure that you create a way to talk with one another the day of (a text thread, a signal or WhatsApp group, etc.) so you can coordinate if and when such a plan is ever needed.

The conversation will hopefully evolve as they or you bring up other concerns that both of you would be willing to address together.

And bam, you’ve just made a connection with your neighbor.

The next step is to gauge the scale of disaster preparedness already in your neighborhood. The ideal situation is that your neighborhood already has an emergency plan or network in place, and if that’s the case, it's a simple matter of plugging yourself into it. I would approach your Neighborhood association, council, commission or what have you to see what plans they have.

If that structure doesn’t exist, you (and preferably others you trust in your community) will have to begin the long process of reaching out to people, such as your neighborhood association, to establish this network. This will involve organizing skills like getting people to come to meetings, so if that's work you are interested in, I am linking a guide here.

The reason why you want to do this is that prepping for every eventuality is prohibitively expensive and often impossible. Not everyone in your neighborhood needs a grill or a HAM radio, etc., but if one person is willing to share that resource during a disaster, then it improves everyone's overall preparedness. As the guide I linked above argues:

“For example, in the aftermath of a hurricane, there’s really no need for every house on your block to have a chainsaw, When the power is out, one or two families with BBQ grills can host the others for an outdoor dinner! Not every household needs to have a trained ham radio operator; a couple of enthusiastic hams can provide important emergency communications for the whole neighborhood.”

At the end of this process, you should have a better sense of what the people in your neighborhood will do during a disaster, and that will only strengthen the bonds with those around you.

A disastrous conclusion

It's hard to develop a community in 21st-century America. We are so atomized as a society that most prep is viewed through an individualist lens where people fixate on how to make the perfect bugout bag or have a decades worth of food in their basements, but this approach is misguided because you will most likely be able to lean on other people.

Developing a disaster plan with your neighbors only requires a desire for mutual protection. You don’t need to like each other, so it’s far easier to get someone to agree to do it, and before you know it, you’ve built a relationship where none previously existed.

These connections are what we will need to draw upon in the years ahead.

Emilia Pérez Is Mediocre Trans Representation

Image; Netflix

If you have been following the 2025 Oscars, you’ve probably heard about Emilia Pérez (2024), the film about a transgender crime lord who stages her own death so she can start over a new life as her preferred gender. The film’s namesake is for this new identity, Emilia Pérez, that she takes on post-transition, and much of the film is about her wrestling with the horrors of her previous life.

A film with this subject matter is naturally going to earn some criticism. We are currently undergoing a global moral panic toward transgender people, and so a big-budget movie that centers a transgender character so prominently will receive a lot of negative reactions, especially from far-right actors.

Yet this film also generated much criticism from people on the left, so I wanted to dive into some of the film’s less ideal elements and what they mean for trans representation overall.

The technical issues

Some of the criticisms of this film are technical. Emilia Pérez straddles the musical and drama genres but does not fully commit to either. It’s both, which means some of these elements occasionally get lost in the shuffle.

It has a fairly hackneyed plot that is a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Gone Girl (2014). Emilia spends much of the movie pretending to be a long-lost aunt just so she can spend time around her children, and that premise has an insidious quality to it that I don’t think is ever genuinely reckoned with.

Emilia Pérez continuously does more selfish and self-centered things, and because she has money, she can more or less get away with them. Her desires ping-pong so frequently that viewers will find themselves returning to that money argument throughout the film as she strains her secret identity to its breaking point.

Yet no one ever finds out about her past until she willingly discloses it on her deathbed.

Then there are the film’s musical elements. Much of Emilia Pérez’s songs are just okay. They are not pop hits that will have you returning for more, like Spotify sensations such as Hadestown (2006) and Dear Evan Hansen (2016), but often little ditties that end almost as quickly as they start. The songs in Emilia Pérez are at their best when they are raw reflections on how its characters feel in the moment.

My favorite is Deseo, sung by Emilia Pérez during the early stages of her transition. She spends most of the earlier half of the film awkwardly mumble-singing to the point where you can barely understand her. And then, in Deseo, she starts to talk about how she wants to transition, and you hear a bittersweet song of longing escape her lips, and it’s beautiful. It honestly brought me to tears, and I thought the setup was done competently.

Yet I am not going to listen to Deseo or any other song in this movie on Spotify as I would for Wicked (2024)— another Oscar-nominated musical released this year — because none of them stand on their own as songs, except for maybe the song El Mal. And that’s frankly fine. I don’t think every musical needs to be separated from its context so you can listen to it while driving to work, or at the gym, or whatever.

That’s not my issue with Emilia Pérez as a musical. My problem is that some of its songs are just bad. The song La Vaginoplastia has been pilloried on the Internet a lot, but stylistically, that song has more legs than, say, Lady, which was painful for me to get through. When the lawyer character Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) sang dud lines in Lady, such as “changing the body changes society,” I had to pause the film and restart the song several times just to get through it.

All of this is to say that I understand the criticisms that this movie sometimes falls flat. It has some good moments but also some utterly incompetent ones that left me scratching my head.

Ugh, the politics

Now, there is a larger criticism going around in queer circles about how the film is appropriative. Many queer outlets dismissed it as regressive, with GLAAD calling it a “step backward for trans representation” and Amelia Hansford of PinkNews claiming it was “vacuous in its messaging and yet so confident in its conviction.”

The YouTuber Jessie Gender went even further, asserting that the film centers on cisgenderness throughout the entire process. In their video essay, The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Pérez, they argue:

It's kind of wild that the film spends 15 whole minutes grounding us in Rita’s struggles and perspective before we even meet Amelia Perez, the titular trans woman…Rita’s perspective serves as a convenient entry point for cisgender audiences into Amilia Pérez…The film is not about centering Amelia’s interiority, instead we’re shown her through a cisgender externalized lens.

And yes, the film suffers from that problem.

Think about the most viral scene in this movie: the one where Rita travels to Bangkok to learn all about the various surgeries a transgender person can undergo. The viewer experiences this via a musical number where Rita is bombarded with all the various terms for gender-affirming surgeries, and yet these surgeries are never contextualized.

Seriously, the song is called La Vaginoplastia, but I don’t think the average viewer would walk away understanding what that is. It’s simply this wacky magical experience to Rita, and that’s a very outside-looking-in perspective.

There are a lot of details, both technical and emotional, that the film skips over. We see none of the various issues that come with waiting for the body to heal in between surgeries (because there are many, not just one) or the emotional turmoil that occurs as one waits in that in-between: a topic that would have occurred if this film was less centered on the cisgendered experience.

Instead, we essentially skip that lengthy period and jump to four years later, after Emilia has already perfectly integrated into womanhood. There is no attempt to humanize this experience, and quite frankly, I think the reason for that is, again, that the writers didn’t want to include that interiority—the film's transgenderness was merely set dressing.

Other issues have been brought up, too. Emilia Pérez’s deadname is used frequently after her transition. There is also an argument Jessie Gender proposes that the film frames transness as dangerous. But I think you get the point: for a film so focused on trans representation, its trans representation isn’t very good.

An angry, trans conclusion

Emilia Pérez is not a great film. I would not even classify it as a good film. It’s a middling movie that occasionally hits on some good points but is mostly tired and sometimes offensive.

It’s the type of appropriative movie I expect to see whenever a marginalized identity enters the spotlight, and that’s okay. It’s fine for there to be a trans film that is mediocre. One of the bigger problems with media representation right now is that there are not a lot of mainstream trans characters overall, so subpar pieces of work end up meaning more than they should.

Truthfully, Emilia Pérez is only in the spotlight right now because of the ongoing moral panic toward trans people. A lot of cisgender people in the Academy wanted to make a statement about their support for trans rights, and this is the film that was available to meet their arbitrary standards. While elevating a mediocre movie to make such a statement is paternalistic and arguably transphobic (and I would have much preferred we elevated a trans director with a good film to have made that statement), it’s the type of token allyship I have come to expect from Hollywood.

Is that better than the regressive backlash we are experiencing from conservatives?

Yes, I would much rather suffer through these bad attempts at allyship so cisgender directors can learn from our community’s criticisms than the alternative. But hopefully, we can transition to a third, more progressive option during next year’s Oscars, where we celebrate trans films that are actually good.

In the meantime, if you want to see a trans film released last year that was neither offensive nor terrible, go see I Saw the TV Glow.

‘Lower Decks’ Was The Best Trek

Image; Paramount+

For the longest time, my favorite Trek was Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). I loved how it forced Star Trek to grabble with its utopian premise. Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) was not helming a spaceship exploring some unknown part of the galaxy but was in charge of a space station at the center of the Federation’s political universe. He had to balance a tenuous political situation between the Bajorans and Cardassians as well as an unknown threat that would bring the Beta and Alpha quadrants to their knees.

Many of its episodes questioned the limits of utopia when faced with an external threat uninterested in upholding the Federation’s ideals. Some of its episodes are ones I still think of today, so much so that I never thought another Trek show would take its place in my heart as number one.

That is until Lower Decks blasted onto the scene in 2020. The comedy about a group of lower-deckers (i.e., non-bridge crew) going on wacky adventures somehow managed to carve out a perfect balance between funny and thought-provoking — all while giving long-term fans little inside jokes that did not upset the overall integrity of each episode.

I know the case for what is ultimately the best is subjective (people are allowed to like what they like, even the inferior Enterprise), but I wanted to make the case for why I think Lower Decks is thee show Trekies should adore.

So, sit back and engage.

What Lower Decks Does Different

Lower Decks is a show about an irreverent, irresponsible ensign named Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) slowly learning to take herself more seriously in no small part due to her other lower deckers Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells), Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and later T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz). They are aboard the Cerritos, a “second contact” ship that finishes the missions that other more important members of Star Fleet started.

This framing does two essential things that a lot of modern Trek could benefit from.

The first is that, at least initially, it lowers the stakes so that the show can focus on more mundane aspects of the Trek universe that often get neglected. How do inter-department transfers work in Star Fleet? What happens when someone is demoted, or your captain is a micromanager? These are some smaller stakes problems that are so rarely focused on in this TV universe.

And that’s a problem because Trek retreads some topics so frequently it can feel stale. Trek is a series where the number of wrinkled-foreheaded aliens with few cultural variances is numbered in the hundreds, and sometimes that makes it difficult to care about the latest away mission on whatever “Planet of Hats” we happen to be visiting. There are only so many times I can see the same political and cultural dilemmas trodded out before wanting something new.

Secondly, this premise allows the show to revisit some of the more famous moments of Trek history without feeling overly gratuitous. The Cerritos can, of course, visit the murderous robot Landru from The Original Series (TOS) or the Ferengi capital of Ferenginar because its job is to check up on previously visited places. The show can build on top of existing ideas rather than trying to make up a new immortal alien for the umpteenth time.

As a consequence of this solid premise, the show is just tighter than previous iterations. In the words of Christian Blauvelt in Indiewire of the first four episodes:

“There’s a lived-in feeling to the comedy too, like it emerges organically from actual storytelling that continues the particular ’90s-style exploration of the galaxy we saw on ‘Next Gen’ and ‘Deep Space Nine.’…By the end of the four 25-minute episodes made available, you feel even that much more connected to all of the characters than you would have after 100 minutes of any previous ‘Trek’ series. It’s quite an achievement.”

This conciseness is unique because most Treks do not have such a tight beginning, middle, and end, and that rarity elevates it above the other Treks in this IP’s discography.

Most Trek Shows Have Rough Seasons

There’s been a saying among Star Trek Fans that every show has a bad first season. As Christian Blauvelt continues in that article: “Every single ‘Trek’ has struggled to find its footing at first, to define its characters and make them ‘tick’ with the audience in a meaningful way.”

Sometimes, these gaps are obvious, with several decades in hindsight. The Original Series (TOS) not only had some clunkers, but it also had a longstanding bit of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) trying to seduce various women, which has not aged well by more contemporary standards.

In fact, this sexism remained in the show’s DNA till the end. TOS’s final episode, Turnabout Intruder, had what Hollywood.com calls: “…a dispiritingly sexist commentary on gender roles.” Captain Kirk switches bodies with a female scientist and makes the incredibly bizarre claim that women are barred from being starship captains in Starfleet, something you would hope a Utopian future had moved beyond at that point.

We see this souring of past storylines in 90s Treks as well. The Next Generation’s (1987–1994) first season consisted of mostly rehashed script ideas from TOS that were quite bad, including a very racist episode (Code of Honor) about the crew landing on an all-Black planet that replicates a very harmful trope about Black men preying on white women. Voyager (1995–2001) not only managed to completely bungle its Maquis storyline, but the way Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) treated Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) is now considered by many to be quite sexist. Even my beloved Deep Space Nine has plenty of mediocre episodes (see The Passenger) as well as an ending that remains controversial to this day.

Surprisingly, the inter-period between 90s Trek and our modern Trek that began in 2017 was even rougher. It’s very obvious now that Enterprise (2001–2005) drew heavily on the paranoia of post-9/11 to tell a story about temporal terrorism that seems quite dated. The J.J. Abrams Kelvin Timeline movies continued this trend by likewise focusing on temporal terrorism, and its second movie, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), focuses almost exclusively on the militarization of Star Fleet as a theme.

Some of modern Trek is much better than what came before. It cannot be overstated how much nostalgia causes people to ignore the problems I cited above (as well as the many I have missed), but even these new shows have been far from perfect. Discovery (2017–2024) never quite knew what it wanted to be, radically shifting its premise so much that by the time we got to the final season, we had shifted timelines. Its kid show, Prodigy (2021–2024), never made much of a splash, sunsetting after just two seasons. Picard (2020–2023) likewise had a rough time going, ultimately shifting focus every season as well.

It was Strange New Worlds (2022–present) that was meant to be Modern Trek’s liferaft, so much so that Discovery spent its entire second season setting it up, MCU-style. However, even here, there have been very weak episodes.

For example, the episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach is a direct homage to Ursula K Leguin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, about a utopian society built on the suffering of a single child. The plot is nearly identical, but since the Federation is likewise a utopian society that doesn’t have to make such a sacrifice, the impact of this episode is nonexistent. As Mike Poteet argues:

“…the would-be morally damning questions Alora (Lindy Booth) asks of Pike — ‘Can you honestly say that no child suffers for the benefit of your Federation? That no child lives in poverty or squalor, while those who enjoy abundance look away?’ — ought to be easily answered by Pike in the 23rd century, ‘Yes, I can honestly say that!’ The episode attempts a moral interrogation of the Federation along the lines of those Star Trek: Deep Space Nine used to do, but Alora’s accusations simply don’t ring true of the Federation as we know it, however much they do, sadly, apply to our own society.”

There were many episodes like this in the first season that had a premise that appeared thought-provoking, only for it to fall apart when you thought about it for a little bit. Most Trek is an act of sifting through the river of time until we only pick out the gold, but that means we often have to discard much of what is left to enjoy it.

Yet, when it comes to Lower Decks, I find myself having to discard very little.

No notes

Lower Decks came out of the gate, knowing exactly what it wanted to be. While shows such as Discovery and Picard had constant identity crises that weakened their overall stories, Lower Decks went on to produce great season after great season.

One can argue that it’s because Lower Decks is a comedy sitcom, not prestige television like Discovery and Strange New Worlds, and so it was able to be far more formulaic. But to me, such a structural argument makes Discovery’s flaws seem inevitable and absolves its writers and directors of all responsibility. A medium is not the sole cause of a show’s success or failure. The writing, acting, and direction matter a lot, too, and from what I have seen so far, Lower Decks has come out on top.

Hopefully, even this will change as Trek’s IP continues to grow and evolve.

Let’s make it so.

Disney’s Transgender Reversal Is as Unsurprising as It Is Dangerous

Image; Disney’s Pixar

For the past half-decade, Disney has been at the center of a vicious culture war around what conservatives would call “wokeness” and what everyone else would label as not making it a big f@cking deal when a non-white straight person is in a movie. The company’s very public fight against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill in 2022 had it recast as a “woke” entity in the minds of many conservatives. Whenever a gay person appeared in a Marvel movie or a Black person starred in a film, conservative hate influencers would lose their shit.

However, in December of 2024, Disney created headlines by pulling back from showing a trans storyline on the Pixar streaming series Win or Lose (note: the character still exists; it’s just all references of them being transgender have been scrubbed). Disney CEO Bob Iger justified the decision as not wanting his company to be too political, saying: “Infusing messaging is not what we’re up to. We need to be entertaining.”

The assumption here is that transgender people are by our very nature politically uncomfortable — a direct pivot away from the more progressive angle the company had been courting before Trump’s second term.

While this may go against the conservative framing, this action is not surprising to anyone paying attention. Disney, or more accurately, the leadership driving it, has always been rather conservative. And as our country moves further to the right, they are merely responding to the conservative center that they so crave to appeal to.

Standing on the line

When we talk about the viewpoint of a company, we are speaking in generalities. It’s important to note that a company is always a site of struggle among many different forces. In the case of the Don’t Say Gay Bill (one of the inciting incidents in the conservative narrative), there was not a united position.

Leadership was not very keen to oppose the law when it first passed, particularly then-CEO Bob Chapek. It was only when Disney’s workers created a stink about the issue — the highlight of this being a massive employee walk-off where hundreds marched out of the company’s headquarters in Burbank — that its leadership “reassessed” its position and publicly condemned the law’s passage. As summarized by Devan Coggan:

Chapek and Disney soon received pushback, both from inside and outside of the company. A group of Pixar employees penned a public letter decrying Chapek’s response and arguing that Disney has a history of censoring LGBTQ representation in films. And last week, Disney employees staged a walkout in protest — a move supported by celebrities and Disney stars including Oscar Isaac, Raven-Symoné, and Mark Ruffalo. Chapek later reversed course, apologizing for the company’s weak response and vowing to pause political donations in Florida.

When I look at Disney’s history, I see that there has been a constant battle over adopting more left-leaning issues. This is the same company whose early history included a notorious animators strike in ’41 and, as recently as 2024, has had employees allege that they were discriminated against for wearing pro-union buttons (something they are legally allowed to do). Disney is not “woke” by any stretch of the imagination and usually only does the right thing after immense pressure from workers inside the company and frustrated consumers outside of it.

It’s the same with representation in media. Disney has a long history of cutting out queer content in its films for foreign and sometimes domestic releases. While it may be cutting out a trans character in America now, not too long ago, it was doing the same for same-sex kisses in Star Wars and the like. Its inclusion of diverse characters now only makes sense as a milestone when you factor in the company’s historic conservativism. As I argue in Does Disney Care About Diversity?:

Given this company’s history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company’s recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.

Disney, the company, has rarely been at the forefront of any left-leaning issue — either in real life or in the case of representation. It has merely been reacting to cultural trends and then branding its milquetoast acquiescence as going “above and beyond.” In the words of one assistant editor at Pixar:

Disney has not been in the business of making great content. They’ve been in the business of making great profits. Even as far back as two years ago when I was at Pixar, we had a meeting with [then-CEO] Bob Chapek, and they were clear with us that they see animation as a conservative medium.

What right-wing reactionaries have been responding to is not that Disney is woke or Marxist or whatever boogeyman they have conjured up, but that for a brief period, they (i.e., the right) lost the culture war around queer representation. There was an accelerated acceptance of queer rights in the late 2010s, with the high point probably being the legalization of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court in 2015. This normalization made Disney’s leaders feel safe enough to greenlight content with queer characters, and even then, only after a very protracted timeline.

Yet progress is never linear, and the right did not stop trying to undo these gains. Its powerbrokers invested billions into media apparatuses, such as The Daily Wire, that were partly dedicated to reversing course on America’s increased acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in both real life and in media. This infrastructure allowed a cottage industry to boom of various influencers spending much of their time decrying whenever IP, such as Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, and The Lord of the Rings, incorporated Black and queer characters.

As a consequence, Disney, as one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, often found itself at the center of this outrage for creating media that was (at the time) mainstream. While American culture was decidedly in the anti-right-wing camp, the company was willing to take the heat (at least rhetorically, as they largely continued to censor queer representation in their films abroad).

Yet, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s successful 2024 election, the political mainstream appears to be shifting again. The right successfully used culture war grievances, particularly that of transgender rights, to retake power, which means that talking about diversity, at least to the conservative leadership of the Disney company, no longer seems profitable.

With the latest removal of this trans storyline in Win or Lose, Disney is doing what they have always done: appealing to America’s conservative base. The company’s official line now appears to be framing transgender people as intrinsically not family-friendly. As one Disney spokesperson said in a statement of the company’s decision to axe the trans representation in Win or Lose:

When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.

This response is not that of a liberal defender or even of a far-right reactionary, but Disney’s media team doing what they have always done: covering their asses. We are undergoing a rightward turn on trans representation, and Disney is responding to it in the same way they were responding to the increase in trans rights when Disney first commissioned Win or Lose back in 2020; they are readjusting.

Its leadership is trying to remain on the line of what is and is not acceptable, and that doesn’t include trans people anymore.

An unmagical conclusion

The worst part about this recent indicator, and the disgusting PR language above, is that this turn was transparent to anyone aware of the company’s inner workings. As I argued back in 2022:

[For Disney], whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are. Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity? Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country’s opinions on “diversity” change?

Well, here we are, experiencing a reactionary backlash, and I don’t think the Mickey Mouse company is coming to save us.

EPIC: Reimagining the Odyssey with Women Characters That Don’t Suck

Image; Jorge Rivera-Herrans

EPIC’s creator, Jorge Rivera-Herrans, started putting up videos on TikTok for their concept album back in December of 2022. Based on Homer’s The Odyssey — the classic Greek tale of the warrior Odysseus trying to find his way back home in the face of Gods and monsters — Jorge Rivera-Herrans retells this story as an upbeat pop musical. The central tension is his main character, Odysseus (sung by Jorge Rivera-Herrans himself), trying and failing to maintain his humanity in the face of many challenges.

I loved this concept album. The music composition is impressive, with Rivera-Herrans harkening back to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf by associating each central character in EPIC with a different type of instrument: piano for Athena, guitar for Odysseus, lyre for Hermes, and so forth. All of it adds a sense of cohesion that allows the listener to quickly jump back into the story in between updates or “sagas.”

This musical updates a story that, by all accounts, has some quite sexist elements to it and adds a level of depth and humanity to its female characters that is refreshing to see.

The before and after

I havetalked previouslyabout the sexist nature of many Greek myths and stories, but to reiterate, the ancient Greek city-states were, by today’s standards, quite misogynistic places. Married women in Athens, for example, were under the complete authority of their husbands (note: if you want to do a deeper dive, Prof. Jorunn Økland has anhour-long YouTube lectureon the notion of equality in ancient Greece).

The Odyssey was a reflection of those ideals. While there were divinely feminine figures in this story, such as Athena, many women fell into the dichotomy of either faithful servants (see Odysseus’s wife Penelope) or some variant of temptress that our male protagonist had to overcome.

For example, the character Calypso — daughter of the Titan Atlas— traps Odysseus on an island for seven long years. Zeus then forces her to release him. In the original story, she highlights the double standard of not being able to take a mortal man as her lover in the same way the male Gods can, but she ultimately acquiesces to this hierarchy, providing Odysseus with food and everything he needs to make a raft to leave her island. As Laurent Ziment reflects:

“In the Homeric epochs, a clear gender hierarchy is established with gods at the top, followed by mortal men, followed by goddesses, and finally mortal women. In this hierarchy, though goddesses have the same ilk of power as the gods and are by far much stronger than the mortal men, gender roles push them down in the hierarchy, prioritizing the Greek patriarchy over sheer power…In this scene, the ability to fully speak one’s mind with a valid argument is trumped by the gender hierarchy, something that is often seen throughout the epochs.”

In EPIC, we do not have the same reverence for the Gods, so instead, Calypso’s fate is depicted as less of a natural hierarchy she must follow and more of something she has been forced into. In the song Not Sorry For Loving You, she tells Odysseus that she has been trapped on this island for most of her life, with no one for company, singing

“I spent my whole life here
Was cast away when I was young
Alone for a hundred years
I had no friends but the sky and sun”

It’s not great, ethically speaking, that she trapped Odysseus, but this recontextualization makes her decision less about her being a God angry that she cannot take advantage of mortals in the same way male Gods can and more about the isolation imposed on her by her fellow immortals.

She is now a tragic figure rather than a petty, vindictive one.

Another update is with Circe, the witch who turns members of Odysseus’s crew into animals. It’s been argued that in the original myth, she is a warning to men about the dangers of feminity. Hermes explicitly warns against succumbing to her wiles, and as a consequence of not resisting them, Odysseus and his crew lose a year on her island. As Marica Felici argues in The Collector:

“Circe is a concubine that uses her sensuality to lure men into her trap. She transforms those men she does not like, while seducing those she fancies. She is aware of her ability to charm and uses it on Odysseus who loses his desire to return home. Thus, Circe is the mistress who has the power to make the hero forgets about his oikos (“household”) and wife. Therefore she is the prototype of the femme fatale, a woman who has the power to catalyze and absorb men’s desires and energies. She is able to convince Odysseus to stay with her in Aeaea by offering him a life full of pleasure.”

However, EPIC’s Circe has a motivation for her hostilities beyond the perils of her feminity. Her decision to attack Odysseus’s crew is rooted in her painful experiences with other men in the past. As she sings in Done For:

“My nymphs are like my daughters
I protect them at all costs
The last time we’ve let strangers live
We faced a heavy loss.”

I empathize with her and her decisions because she is just as much a victim as an aggressor.

This empathizing with the feminine applies to even the more extreme examples in the Odyssey. Take the sirens—another peril of femininity. These monsters try to lure sailors to their deaths with enchanting songs. The central theme of the siren epoch is overcoming temptation, with Odysseus instructing his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship so he can still listen to their song without succumbing to it.

The Sirens don’t have a better motivation in EPIC, still trying to lure his crew to their deaths, but instead, the thing that has changed is Odysseus. Following the Underworld Saga (see Monster), he has decided to become crueler so that he can do what is “necessary” to get home to his wife and child, and as a result, he mercilessly slaughters all the sirens. Odysseus and his crew singing in Different Beast:

“We are the man-made monsters
We are the ones who conquer
You are a threat no longer
We won’t take more suffering from you.”

Whereas in previous parts of the story, he would have tried to find a less violent solution (see his preservation of the Cyclops), his destruction of the sirens is not depicted as a masculine triumph like in the original but rather a reflection of how far he has fallen.

I could keep on listing examples. From the emotional arc of Athena to the haunting motivations of Scylla and many more, it was refreshing to see how this musical recasts the motivations of this story’s female characters. They were no longer trite lessons on the dangers of feminity but instead three-dimensional characters with their own wants and desires.

An epic conclusion

With the fantastic conclusion of the Ithaca Saga, I want to make clear that I appreciate EPIC for its strong vision. Jorge Rivera-Herrans was willing to remix and remove parts of the original story that no longer appealed to modern sensibilities, and in an era where everyone has been decrying “wokeness,” that was not an easy thing to jumpstart a brand on.

This praise doesn't mean I found this musical perfect regarding gender. For all the agency and backstory granted to this story’s divine woman, its two mortal woman characters spent their time waiting for our hero—one of them even dying in the process (see Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, in the song The Underworld). Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, was played fairly traditionally, with her choosing to be with him at the end.

There was no real reinvention to her story whatsoever.

Yet, this nitpick aside, I mostly enjoyed this tale. We are constantly reimagining the past, and withEPIC, I see our modern sensibilities seeping through the cracks of an ancient, hierarchical story, and that makes me feel slightly better about the present.

Arcane Season 2 Was About Breaking The Cycle of Violence: It Failed

Image; Netflix

Arcane (2021–2024) is a show I admire a lot (you can see my glowing review of season one here).

For the uninitiated, it’s a steampunk fantasy series based on the arena battle game League of Legends. Forces across the techno-magical city of Piltover and its underbelly, Zaun, fight on behalf of various factions to see who comes out on top. We have a startling array of characters from noble houses to revolutionaries to underground crime syndicates.

The imagery of Arcane is dazzling, fast-paced, and consistently over the top. Sometimes, we start an episode with the flaming wreckage of the Piltover Council Chambers (see Heavy Is The Crown). Other times, the animation style switches to a series of stills that have an almost comic-book quality to them (episode three, Finally Got The Name Right).

Yet, while the first season was a, in my opinion, well-explored examination of the cycle of violence, the second season is a far less compelling, more saccharine examination of how to break said cycle.

A show that gives us the aesthetic of revolutionary change and little else.

The bad ways to break the cycle

Last season, the central tension was the cruel Zaunite Revolutionary and crimelord Silco (Jason Spisak) and his charge Jinx (Ella Purnell) fighting against the Piltover government for independence. Zaun is an apartheid state caught in a bitter war for self-determination against Piltover’s technocratic, commerce-driven leaders.

Season one ends with Jinx blowing up the Piltover council chambers mere moments before they vote in favor of Zaunite Independence. She is too resentful to give peace a chance, showing the viewer how this culture is stuck in a cycle of violence.

A huge question for season two is how to break that cycle — something we are shown in the fragile moments where this goal is achieved.

For example, in episode seven (Pretend Like It’s The First Time), we find ourselves in an alternative timeline, where the tragedies of season one more or less don’t happen, and we see a Zaun moving in a better direction. As the character Ekko (Reed Shannon) says of this timeline: “I used to dream the undercity could be like this.”

The show plays with the various structures and methods that could get Zaun and Piltover to this peace — its tension centered around these methods’ flaws and limitations.

In episode six (The Message Hidden Within the Pattern), we come across an almost utopian society in the underground, led by the scientist Viktor (Harry Lloyd), who has used the magic of Hextech to cure the glimmer addiction plaguing Zaun’s most disenfranchised. Viktor (whose eastern European-sounding name and totalizing equality alludes to the Soviet Union) wants to create a society free of division, and he’s not afraid to resort to violence to get there.

He ultimately becomes the primary antagonist — a man who creates a hive mind he calls the “Glorious Evolution” that is bent on removing all discord from the world by doing away with individuality entirely. In Viktor’s words: “Choice is false. It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division. Death, war, prejudice. Energy spent only to consume itself. But we can be of one mind (see episode 9, The Dirt Under Your Nails).”

Another character who tries to achieve a similar forced peace is General Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas), who uses violence to create a sense of safety in Piltover. Her Noxus forces set up checkpoints as part of a brutal manhunt for Jinx that ends up oppressing many Zaunites. She is trying to create peace by enforcing conformity through violence, though admittedly not as totalizing as the erasure of identity proposed by Viktor.

Her violence is likewise framed antagonistically in the series — something we are meant to hate. As Jinx’s sister Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), one of our point of view characters, tells the Piltover noble Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung), who allowed Ambessa’s Noxus forces to police the city: “How long were you saddled up with that shifty, self-serving war pig (Ambessa)? She oinked poison in your ear, and you just ate it.”

So, if Ambessa’s law and order mentality and Viktor’s totalizing conformity fail to achieve true peace (and I tend to agree that they do), what is this show’s solution?

And why do I walk away from this season so unsatisfied by it?

The trap of forgiveness

In season two, there are fleeting moments of resistance against these forces: the street activism of the Zaunite underground; the anarchistic, nonviolent revolutionaries of Ekko’s Firelights, who provide aid to those hurt by Piltover crackdowns; the “change-it-from-the-inside” mentality Vi attempts when she temporarily becomes an enforcer (i.e., Piltover’s police force); and many more.

However, the two common enemies we cited in the previous section — i.e., Ambessa and Viktor — are ultimately what causes Piltover’s border checkpoints to be dismantled and its discrimination against Zaunites to be paused. As Ambessa and Viktor join up to attack the city, the Piltover elite abandons their efforts to crack down on the underground and asks for Zaun’s aid instead. In the words of councilor Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro):

“This isn't a fight for ideals or territory. It's a fight for humanity itself. I’m asking…no, begging you, every one of you, topside and bottom, to aid us in this coming war. And it will be a war. Now, this isn't a fair request, but it is our only hope. The forces against us are too great. We need every hand we can get.”

It is this call to set aside resentments so that both sides can join in a common purpose, which is framed as the way for the city to achieve true peace. The thing both Piltover and Zaun need to do, the show argues, is forgive each other so that they can focus on the more significant threat.

We see this call for forgiveness in the alternative timeline, too. In one touching scene, Ekko meets this timeline’s version of Silco, the pro-Zaun revolutionary who started many of the events in season one. Ekko asks Silco how he was able to set aside his animosities. Silco replies with a call to squash resentment: “The greatest thing we can do in life is find the power to forgive.”

While I am not against the idea of forgiveness, I find this framing of both sides needing to unite to achieve peace disturbing as it ignores the power dynamics at play. The two sides here were not equal. Most Zaunite revolutionaries, with maybe the exception of Ekko’s Firelights, were undoubtedly violent, but it was often a violence in reaction to Piltover’s apartheid. Piltover leaders, not the people of Zaun, put into place legal and material barriers that forced most Zaunites into squalor.

Even if legal emancipation holds (a big if) once the threat of Ambessa and Viktor passes, it does not undo the generations of economic and political inequality that such apartheid would have created. While removing legal discrimination may be a necessary first step, so too is the redistribution that would inevitability have to occur after. If ongoing reparations and attempts to dismantle Piltover’s unequal systems are not made, things will quickly settle back into a similar status quo.

We see this in our world with countries such as the United States, which had active apartheid against Black Americans for many years. Similar (though not exactly identical) to Zaunites, Black Americans were barred from many aspects of modern life — a fact that is so ingrained in my people’s history that it should hardly need reinforcing.

Yet even after legal rights were granted to Black Americans in the form of voting, education integration, and more, it did not undo material inequality. There is currently a substantial divide between Black and white Americans in nearly every indicator, from retirement to healthcare to debt to housing, and it’s because we never truly addressed the material disparity our system created, instead letting it erode into the chasm it is today.

While some argue that all we must do to solve such problems is set aside our animosities and come together — in other words, to stop being so divided by race and other such identities — without a plan to address such material divides, these inequalities will persist.

Whether we are talking about the country of America or the magical city of Piltover, systemic discrimination is not solved by mere words.

An arcane conclusion

From my perspective, this show’s perspective on undoing systemic discrimination is intellectually lazy. The entire second season engages in a conversation on bridging divides, and rather than diving into the complexities that uphold such inequalities, we get a rather simplistic message of “we’re all in this together.”

Don’t get me wrong; common problems always emerge: Enemies start wars, natural disasters level communities, and climates shift. Circumstances do force people to temporarily come together and put aside their differences, but in my lifetime, I have rarely seen such events lead to a permanent realignment. We tend to return to the status quo the day after disaster ends. It rarely matters if the unfairness baked into those arrangements long precedes such crises; when a fire, hurricane, war, or some other such disaster abates, people are expected to go back to paying their rents, honoring their debts, and returning to work.

The cruelty of such arrangements be damned.

It’s this reality that made this show’s message of unity so frustrating and honestly patronizing. Arcane tried to show us how to end the cycle of violence and instead gave us appealing pleasantries and nothing more.

You Don’t Have to be Friends with the Conservatives Who Hate You

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whenever this country moves further to the right, there is a general call to action for those on the left to have even more conversations with those on the right. “The Democrats need to talk to different people, like Joe Rogan,” Matthew Yglesias argues in Bloomberg. “[Some] recognize they can’t change their loved ones’ opinions from afar,” goes a Vox article, “More still have wisened to the reality that avoiding varying viewpoints only fuels polarization.”

I want to push back against this logic that claims we must appeal to the feelings of the dominant socioeconomic group whenever they have a reactionary turn. You are not obligated to validate someone’s feelings simply because they are in power, especially if they use said power to discriminate against you.

Furthermore, I am not convinced this outlook is even a sound political strategy.

Engagement isn’t always possible

If we are being charitable, the reason this advice is bandied about so much is that keeping a metaphorical “door open” is a vital component for deradicalization (i.e., trying to pull individuals back from hateful ideologies such as white supremacy and fascism) or disengagement (i.e., getting them to pull back from hateful groups).

The advice I see over and over again from organizations dedicated to helping those who have fallen into the far-right ecosystem is to try not to be too forceful in how one goes about with deradicalization. As one RAND study argues: “The interviews and other studies suggest that heavy-handed attempts by formal institutions to deradicalize individuals often fail.” It’s more effective to wait for the myriad of factors that can make one open to deradicalization (e.g., burnout, exposure to alternative views, fellow members leaving, etc.) and then present them with an alternative during that window of opportunity than it is to shame them for their beliefs.

I do not judge people who engage in this deradicalization work as I believe it to be a legitimate form of activism. If you have the capacity to do this work or live in a heavily conservative area that requires you to compromise as an act of survival, by all means, do it — some people need to.

Yet there is a world of difference between claiming that a form of activism is valid for some people and claiming that it is something all people must do.

The reality is that conservative ideas rarely stop and end with thoughts and words. Those words become the basis for actions that can hurt other people, and every person must gauge whether preserving their individual relationship with a conservative is worth ignoring the harm said conservative is compelled to do to uphold such beliefs.

In one example reported via Business Insider, a parent had their child come out as transgender. Although they supported their child’s decision, their parents (the child’s’ grandparents) reacted with hostility. One pair of grandparents went “no contact,” and the other refused to acknowledge their grandchild’s queerness.

Sometimes, the mere act of supporting someone causes others to reject you. If you are a parent in this situation, you might have to decide which person to “help” in the relationship (your child or your parent) because sometimes — too many, in fact — egos force you to choose. As Tamra Moon continues in that Business Insider article:

“My teenager’s grandparents are of a parenting belief system that doesn’t leave much space for children to explore their interests, identities, or feelings in a safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment.”

It would be great if we could exist in a world where we can both keep a door open to those indoctrinated by hateful ideologies and protect the people those ideologies hurt, but defensiveness and brittle self-image often cause these two goals to conflict. In protecting the person they are hurting, you get labeled an enemy, and they no longer see you as a person worth interacting with as an equal.

This is further complicated when you are the person being hurt by such actions. When you are being targeted rhetorically, legislatively, and sometimes even physically, it becomes that much harder to focus on the other person’s reasons for doing said harm. You are often much more focused on your own survival and, quite frankly, do not have the time or resources to care about your oppressor’s hurt feelings.

I am sure the conservatives voting my rights away and sending me death threats have reasons for why they feel the way they do (erroneous reasons, but reasons nonetheless), but I am too busy trying to protect my standard of living to be concerned about their feelings.

If someone is attacking you, you do not keep the door open; you shut it and shut it good.

A frank conclusion

There is a lack of empathy in this entire conversation. A lot of not-so-great people expect to be empathized with at every step of the way, but they shirk at all calls for them to be empathetic toward other people. Their actions are never called into question. Their violence is never examined. They are always the perceptual victims who can do no wrong.

Yes, we want everyone to be saved from the pits of conservatism, but one person is not more important than anyone else. Their journey should not take precedent over the many others they hurt.

Someone does not get to hurt others—maybe even dozens or hundreds of others—and then get to act shocked when those people are not interested in empathizing with them. There are consequences for people’s actions, and sometimes, as a mere act of survival, those actions will cause some to stop caring about you. They will abandon all concern for your growth, your pain, and your survival altogether.

If that sounds harsh, good: it’s a response that is well-earned.

Post-Election ‘I’m Over It’ Claims Are A Trauma Response

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

When Trump was elected, there was a flood of posts from people claiming they were done with US politics: “I’m done with America now. It deserves everything it has coming to it,” comments one user on threads.

“Feeling betrayed by increased minority support for Trump, Black women say they’re stepping back,” runs an AP headline.

“Let me say this: I cried all yesterday [November 5th], but today I woke up and got me some Starbucks,” one person commented in response to abandoning Palestinian activism in the wake of the 2024 election. “Fuck yall, we’re done. For the next four years, we don’t give a fuck about anyone else’s problems. Cheers, ladies.”

I understand the emotion behind these statements, at least in part, but I also don’t believe those who claim such things are deciding to detach themselves from their surroundings. Many are using such rhetoric to socially and psychologically distance themselves from how badly hurt they are by this country, and it’s a familiar feeling.

The idea that one can distance oneself from society has existed for a long time, and it is usually unhelpful in actually protecting oneself.

I Don’t Care Much

The first thing I thought about upon seeing these comments was the 1998 revival of the musical Cabaret, which is about the fictitious Kit Kat Klub in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. The viewer sees the rise of fascism reflected in people who attend this club, particularly through its performances, which become increasingly more anti-semitic and hateful. “But if you could see her through my eyes,” chillingly sings the Kit Kat Klub’s emcee in the second act of the play, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all” (see If You Could See Her).

For our purposes, I want to fixate on the song I Don’t Care Much. The emcee also sings the lyrics of this song, which are about social and emotional distancing from Germany’s deteriorating political situation. The emcee sings: “So if you kiss me. If we touch. Warning’s fair. I don’t care. Very much.”

He’s trying to present himself as someone cool and detached.

Yet the pain in the emcee’s voice makes it very clear that he does care, because he knows, if only subconsciously, that as a queer man, he is on the Nazi regime’s chopping block. The play ends with the emcee revealing he’s wearing the striped clothing of a concentration camp victim. In other adaptations, you can hear the whistle of a train and see the emcee wearing an upside pink triangle (the symbol nazis had LGBT people wear).

The emcee’s nihilism was an attempt to psychologically protect himself, but that strategy didn’t work out, either for his character or the many queer people who attempted to assimilate unsuccessfully during the fall of the Weimar Republic.

There was a vibrant queer scene in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis. Berlin was arguably at the forefront (at least in Europe) of scientific research on sexuality and gender expression. Media censorship and sodomy laws were also less enforceable, which meant that Berlin was the place to be for queers who wanted to live, if not entirely openly, at least more than they could in much of Europe.

Then, as the Nazis scapegoated homosexuality in no small part due to the personal agenda of Heinrich Himmler as well as a public scandal surrounding the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, that community was violently suppressed. Sodomy laws under Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code were strengthened, and this subculture that had once been the jewel of Queer Europe was rather quickly shattered.

What did the queers who lived during that transition do?

There was no uniform response. Some fled. Others went underground. A few bravely fought, both openly and covertly.

Many were proud members of the Nazi party and thought their commitment to nationalism was in some ways compatible with their homosexuality (see “Männerbund” ideology). As Christopher Isherwood (whose semi-autobiographical novel Berlin Stories was the inspiration for the musical Cabaret) disparaged in a later book: “Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded.”

And some, as we have already mentioned, responded to the rise of Nazism with detachment. A good example of this in Berlin Stories is Isherwood’s landlord (a character who also made it into the musical), someone who is willing to keep her head down, no matter the cost. As Isherwood writes:

Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatising herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatising themselves.

After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”

Yet, many German Queers did not have the privilege of keeping their heads down. Even before the shuttering of queer bars and other gathering places, the police had begun adding potential violators of Paragraph 175 to private lists. Many of these lists were then utilized by the Nazi regime. Queer men and women found themselves sent off to concentration camps by the thousands in the years to come — doomed not to live in this town but die by it.

There is no safety here

And yet Frl. Schroeder’s ‘keeping-her-head-down’ outlook is a common sentiment in marginalized communities whenever hope has been momentarily crushed.

In a more modern example, when some perceived the AIDS epidemic as a death sentence victims must simply endure, the Bay Area Reporter editor Paul Lorch encouraged a type of queer nihilism, asserting that suicide was a perfectly rational response to an AIDS diagnosis. As he wrote in a Bay Area Reporter article (that came my way via Am J Public Health) about the epidemic: “Each man owns his body [and] the way he wants to die, [including, perhaps, a] one way walk into the Pacific surf.”

However, this perspective was perceived by some as infantilizing, as it turned those who had HIV/AIDS into objects who lacked the agency to advocate for themselves. Activists were immediately critical of Lorch’s nihilism and not only penned a response letter but created an AIDS patients-only group so those who had the disease could lobby on behalf of themselves. As activist Bobbi Campbell told a rival paper of this newly formed group: “It’s time we stopped being so passive. This group of AIDS patients will be more political, more social…”

It was this shift in perspective that reframed the narrative around HIV/AIDS from one of victims and patients (people predestined to social death before their physiological death) into active participants in a struggle for liberation — people who were deserving of empathy and respect/ People who were fighting a battle they could potentially win.

This mindset shift would ultimately win this community material and political gains in the coming years (see ACT UP, HIV/AIDS destigmatization, etc.).

It’s hard to see how such advocacy would have even been possible if Lorch’s nihilism had won the day, any more than queers keeping their heads down in 1930s Berlin would have avoided the concentration camps of the Nazi regime simply by pretending everything was okay.

Detachment doesn’t protect you if you are already on the chopping block.

A hopeful? conclusion

As we can see, retreating inward does not provide safety. It doesn’t matter if you are attacked or discarded by the state; responding to its cruelty with disconnection doesn’t protect you. It, at best, dulls your senses until the danger passes (a big if) and, at worst, leads you straight into the fire.

Anger and sadness are perfectly rational emotional responses to our society’s cruelties. I am not a fan of America (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending). I do not believe that America’s ideals were ever that great to begin with (see America Has Always Been A Pretty Unrealistic Utopia).

Yet, I also recognize that no one has the luxury of genuinely disconnecting from it. Empires thrive on taking advantage of whole swaths of a population. In our case, America not only relies on a racialized and economically impoverished under-caste but also the billions in resources our firms extract from the Global South. That exploitation does not go away because one is tired or wishes it to.

Sadly, being “fucking done” does not prevent the boot of empire from crushing you beneath its feet.

The Tragic, Liberal Delusion of Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’

Image; Netflix

I remember first coming to Washington, DC, and hearing the way a lot of energetic interns and staff talked about the system. “Sure, it is flawed and annoying sometimes,” a colleague told me shortly after the 2016 election, us sipping coffees during a ‘quick chat’ in one of DC’s many gentrifying cafes, “But give it enough time, and it makes the right decisions.”

It was this conversation I thought of upon seeing the political thriller The Diplomat (2023 — present), a tightly crafted show about a career diplomat for the State Department named Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who is suddenly transferred to the prestigious London office. We learn that this move is a test trial to see if she can handle the role of vice president, and along the way, Kate Wyler stumbles into a conspiracy that could drag the UK, and maybe even the US, into a regional war.

There were many good moments in this show. It was well-acted, the dialogue was witty and poignant, and the set design made me feel like I was there in this fast-paced environment. You can tell a lot of money was spent on this show, and it doesn’t appear to have been wasted (it’s been greenlit for a third season).

Yet, underpinning this show is the idea that the US empire should and must be preserved for the betterment of humanity, and I think that idea is worth dissecting.

It’s all about American Institutions (hegemony)

It’s worth noting that Kate Wyler is an institutionalist. There is a moment when the White House tries to pressure Wyler to take advantage of an Iranian diplomatic asset, and she urges caution instead. She delivers a moving speech on why the relationships maintained by the State Department are so important, saying:

“What were really doing when we negotiate with them, or with anyone, is looking for the one or two friends we can call when the world is fucked. It's a flimsy web of relationships. But sometimes, it holds. Do not tear it. Do not be an infinitely ravenous American.”

If there is a thesis of this show, it’s this monologue. The people who care about Global institutions, particularly ones that benefit the US — the adults in the room who you can call when the world is fucked — are the ones who need to be protected and in charge.

It’s perfectly fine for a character to hold that perspective — a character’s motivations are not interchangeable with a work of art’s motivations — but we never really get a competing narrative to make us think this isn’t the show’s perspective as well. There are so many moments where Kate and her confidants don’t report things to the public for fear that it would undermine US interests, and it’s framed as a commonsense position that doesn’t need a rebuttal.

For example, the main plotline of the first two seasons is that a British Warship called the HMS Courageous has been attacked by an unknown actor, killing 41 British service members. Kate Wyler is partly brought in because of her experience as a crisis diplomat, which gives her insight into untangling such flashpoints.

It’s learned, through a very entertaining cat and mouse game (spoilers, by the way), that this attack was a false flag operation by British operatives who wanted to give the Prime Minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), an upswell of support he could use to prevent Scottland from seceding from the United Kingdom. A Scottish cession movement was picking up steam, and conservatives, led by British advisor Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie), thought the rise in nationalism would “preserve the kingdom.” As US Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) opines about Scotland’s possible secession (logic our POV character Kate also agrees with):

“If the UK eats itself alive, second wave impact, it’s a huge blow to NATO and Five Eyes. Third wave, Northern Ireland, Catalonia. Democracies carving themselves into splinters, while autocracy’s having its best year since ‘37.”

This perspective comes to a head with the twist that the person who really orchestrated the attack was, in fact, Vice President Grace Penn, who worried that a Scottish secession movement would threaten the only European port where US nuclear submarines are allowed to dock. The US, according to the Vice President, would lose the ability to track Russian submarines in the Atlantic, putting American Empire at risk from this larger geopolitical threat.

Kate does not refute the VP’s logic, later admitting that she might have done the exact same thing if she were in the VP’s shoes.

And so, just to recap, we have a democratic secession movement in Scotland — i.e., people trying to exercise their democratic right to self-determination — that is killed by conservative factions in two imperial governments who want to prevent the collapse of both of their empires.

And we are supposed to be okay with that; the framing of the text makes us want to empathize with the logic of these battle-weary veterans who are making difficult decisions to preserve American institutions. Decisions that, even if abhorrent, we are told repeatedly are ultimately justified. As Kate’s husband explains:

“If we make a thing out of [the US killing Scottish Independence], bad for Democracy…Hungry, Poland, Turkey…Democracy is actually going out of style. [It can’t come out].”

If US Empire collapses, the narratives suggest again and again, so too does the concept of Democracy itself.

A diplomatic conclusion

Upon finishing the second season, I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with my friend years ago about how she thought preserving American institutions was good in and of itself, regardless of what those institutions do.

It’s how I used to think, too, almost a decade ago, but recently, I have come to see it as a worldview that can ultimately justify anything. If America needs to be maintained, if the United Kingdom must stand for fear that the vacuum will be even worse, then there are no horrors you can not justify: bomb your own ships, finance a country’s genocide, assassinate a left-leaning government that wants to nationalize its oil fields— anything to keep the wheels of empire turning.

In many ways, I felt like I was watching a modern-day update of The West Wing (1999–2006), which isn’t a compliment. For all the beautiful acting and cinematography, I was disappointed that we did not get more pushback on the show’s primary thesis. An uncritical viewer will probably walk away with the idea that the atrocities done by these characters are, from a birdseye view, justified — and that doesn’t bode well for most of us standing in the line of fire.

A Healthcare CEO Died: I Don’t Have It In Me To Care

CCTV of suspect leaving subway station

As you are probably aware, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by (as of writing this) a yet-to-be-caught assassin in early December of 2024. The attack was potentially politically motivated, with the words deny, defend, and depose written on the shell casings left behind at the crime scene — a possible reference to the overly litigious (and malicious) tactics used by insurance companies.

The reaction to this killing was, much to the chagrin of centrist pundits everywhere, very positive. Immediately, people posted online celebrations of the murder. “I would offer thoughts and prayers, but I’m gonna need a prior authorization first,” one Reddit user allegedly joked shortly after the incident.

And just as quickly, there were condemnations from the center-right about how such celebrations were obscene. “The callous disregard for a human life is alarming to witness,” laments Ingrid Jacques in the Tennessean. “Slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Was a ‘Good Father’” goes the title of a People article.

Regardless of what you feel on this subject, it’s interesting that this conversation is fundamentally rooted in empathy for the person killed (automatically labeling them a victim) and not even entertaining the reasons that motivated said killing.

A framing that decenters the people Thompson hurt in the equation to tell a sanitized tale of his death.

Who should we care about?

The question of when and where violence is appropriate is largely contextual. From the American War of Independence to the French Revolution, most wars for independence were quite violent, and their appropriateness is continuously debated in retrospect.

Your mileage on violence’s acceptability will vary a lot depending on which institutions you hate and which ones you are keen to preserve.

For example, if you want to preserve the current system in its entirety, you’ll probably be in favor of the violence used by institutions to stop agitators (i.e., cops shooting at and teargassing protestors — a war crime), and vice versa for those who hate the state. There is a context in the background on which violence is acceptable and therefore “normal” and which is supposed to be invisible and ignored.

Fundamentally, the Brian Thompson discourse bothers me because it asks us to discard this context and judge this instance out of time. We are being asked not to unpack the circumstances that led to his death but rather to flatten the violence of this assassin into just a random action that happened. As Ingrid Jacques continues in that article:

“…people are reacting with anger and scorn to the death − not because a husband and father was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk. But because of the victim’s job as head of a major health insurance company.”

Such pundits want to make the assassin’s violence the sole thing that is visible in the conversation.

Yet violence is always done in response to something, even if the only motivations are perceived grievances that do not really exist. Whether or not the violence is justified (it’s often not), the perpetrator is reacting to something in their environment, community, culture, and so forth that compels them to harm others.

Again, in the case of Brian Thompson’s assassin, they were most likely reacting to America’s dysfunctional and problematic healthcare system, specifically the fact that insurance companies frequently refuse to pay for the vital care of sick people. A robust KFF survey found that: “a majority of insured adults (58%) say they have experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past 12 months” — many claims of which were reported as unresolved.

United Healthcare, in particular, has implemented a harsh algorithm to reject claims swiftly. Casey Ross and Bob Herman of Stat News wrote of this problem in 2023:

“The nation’s largest health insurance company pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients in lockstep with a computer algorithm’s calculations…the algorithm was to be followed precisely so payment could be cut off by the date it predicted.”

The tens of thousands of people who have died (and will continue to die) from decisions like this one — decisions that Brian Thompson had a hand in — are not centered in this conversation. People who die from negligent care often do not garner public outcries when they die but instead suffer violence that is mainly considered invisible. Such people are expected to die quietly, to whither away so those like Brian Thompson can profit from that suffering.

Our current institutions seem to be okay with the weaponized bureaucratic negligence (or violence) insurance companies enact against such people, but somehow, pundits want us to draw a red line toward the violence committed against one of the upholders of this terrible status quo. A calculus I have trouble wrapping my head around.

It’s always the rich who deserve empathy and never the countless people being f@cked over by them.

A sick conclusion

I don’t know if the violence committed against Brian Thompson was wrong — I don’t think that question is for me alone to answer — but I do know that how many pundits are having this conversation is woefully one-sided. Brian Thompson’s death did not happen in a vacuum; it was a reaction to actions he helped perpetuate. To harm he brought into this world.

And if that’s not going to be acknowledged, I don’t think I have it in me to care about his death.

The thing about our system is that it already forces us to limit our empathy. We pass dying people on the street all the time, and many do nothing because the dysfunction of our current system is too overwhelming for a single individual to grapple with. We don’t have the spoons (see spoon theory) to care, so sometimes we don’t, contributing ever so slightly to another person’s suffering.

Again, people are dying around me every day — so much so that I sometimes have to numb myself to get through it— and yet, in this discourse, I am being asked to stretch that limited supply of empathy to a rich man who perpetrated others’ suffering so he could live a good life.

Frankly, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so, especially since it’s a double standard not being returned by the rich. Many of the Brian Thompsons of the world do not empathize with the people they hurt — as they consider their violence to be natural and invisible. It's only when that violence is turned around on them that we are suddenly supposed to care.

And so, no, the rich do not get my empathy. A violent assassin killed a healthcare CEO, and I do not have any compassion left to give, and I don’t think I will for the next rich man, either.

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back! We shouldn’t accept being a scapegoat

Image; Lucas Werkmeister

Trans rights are not great in this country. They never really have been, but in recent years, there has been an uptick in anti-trans sentiment.

States have started rolling back everything from restricting trans athletes from participating in athletic events that align with their gender to prohibiting those under the age of 18 from accessing gender-affirming care.

The state of Florida, in particular, has passed some of the most regressive laws in the nation. People can only use gendered facilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence centers, and prisons that match the gender they were assigned at birth. Another law has banned everyone under 18 from accessing gender-affirming care. The law has also allowed the state the right to temporarily take away the children of the parents who permit such care.

This shape of affairs is, if anything, picking up steam. Trump made his anti-trans messaging a significant part of his 2024 campaign, with one of Trump’s primary campaign promises being to stop gender-affirming care for minors. This is a promise that very much may come to fruition, considering that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on this on December 4th. The whole country could start looking like Florida soon (if not probably much worse).

And so, what is the Democratic Party (and its center-left allies) doing in response to this worsening trend?

While there have been some calls for support, I see much of the political class trying to back away from defending my community. Commentators are telling the American public to decenter trans people, with Matthew Yglesias, for example, calling on the Democratic Party to view sex through an essentialist lens. Centrist politicians, according to Politico, have alleged that “identity politics and culture war issues need to take a backseat,” with Democratic representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) even doubling down on the position that transgender women should not participate in women’s sports.

A reactionary wave is coming for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and if nothing is done about it, we will experience a backslide felt by the queer community in the US for generations to come.

The backlash to the backlash

The thing about queerness, or whatever you want to call the diversity of gender and sexual expression across history, is that it’s not new (although how it has been framed in each culture has varied dramatically).

We don’t even have to look that far to see examples of this. Many indigenous tribes in the Americas were so beyond the European gender binary that it was undeniable. Going back to the 1500s, even colonizers were writing about Indigenous “men in women’s apparel.”

Yet, over the course of generations, that acceptance was undermined by settler colonialism. Native people were shamed (and, barring that, violently forced) into compliance until, eventually, the Christian-European standards for gender and sexuality became dominant. It’s something Europeans were openly bragging about. According to Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the 18th-century French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau talked about this openly in a report he penned. Simpson summarized this report in her book, As We Have Always Done, writing:

“Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’”

It’s the same pattern worldwide — the demonization of same-sex relationships in India, the strict anti-queer legal code in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. Our hatred of queer people was very much cultivated over generations by white-settler governments.

This trend did not start to reverse until the Post-Stonewall activism of the late 1960s and beyond when militant activists pushed their queer-phobic governments into recognizing them (feel free to read the Stonewall Reader for more context). As a result, these last few decades, we have seen the expansion of parental, marital, employment, and housing rights to some (though certainly not all) groups of queer people in the US, and it has improved the standards of living for many.

For those younger queers who were born in the shadow of this movement, it’s easy to think that this progress was and is inevitable, but it would be a mistake to assume that a similar project of anti-queerness cannot be restarted in the present era. As we have seen, it’s perfectly possible for a society to backslide, and in many ways, the US already has — hence all the anti-trans laws we mentioned at the beginning of this article.

It’s why recent calls by liberals and centrists to backpedal from trans rights are so dangerous because the rights that we have won are not inevitable, and with the complicity of democrats, they very much can be stripped away.

How to stop it

If these pundits have their way, Democrats will stop trying to whip votes against anti-trans and anti-lgbt legislation — a move that would essentially ensure that the politics of Florida are exported across the country.

We must not go back to the Pre-Stonewall days when queers had to hide their identities or risk being ostracized from society, and that means reminding our leaders of what will happen if they stop providing us support.

LGBTQIA+ people are a major constituency for the Democratic Party. Exit polls indicate that around 86% voted for Kamala Harris. We easily represent tens of millions of votes in districts and seats all across the country, and if our politicians aren’t even going to ensure we can continue to exist, then they shouldn’t get our votes. We need to let these leaders know that trans rights are a red line. I encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them they must support trans rights or risk alienating millions of LGBTQIA+ voters with this rhetoric.

And that is more important than a pundit bemoaning the state of ‘identity politics’ on his substack.

‘Wicked: Part I’ Shows Us How Fascism Is Already On Its Way

Image; Universal Pictures[

After I left the theater for the midnight showing of Wicked, dressed in green and wearing a floppy pink hat, the first thing I did upon getting home was cry. I cried so much because, like Cabaret and other musicals before it, its on-the-nose themes made me think about my own country and where we might be going.

Based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire title of the same name, Wicked is about the life of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, referred to in this text as Elphaba. The book chronicles her life as she struggles against the authoritarian Wizard of Oz, a fascistic figure who scapegoats entire classes of people to stay in power, including, eventually, Elphaba herself.

It’s ultimately a tragic tale about how the winners of history can turn fighters for justice into villains.

The musical never abandoned this theme, but it does become less prominent, with the emotional core switching to Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship and the rise of Ozian authoritarianism becoming more of a B-plot. While Maguire’s original retelling had some flashy, risque elements, it’s undoubtedly more substantive than the musical. A large part of the book is about Elphaba’s activism — something the musical only briefly touches upon.

The movie is a hybrid of these two visions. It follows the structure of the musical but uses visuals to heighten the authoritarian (arguably fascist) aesthetic that first came from the book. We are aware of Ozian’s discriminatory nature throughout the film in a way that feels much more consequential than a simple B-plot.

In the wake of the 2024 election, where a right-wing authoritarian government has secured power, one can look at Wicked and almost see the edges of what a possible fascist future could look like, and it makes me incredibly sad.

The Fear of the Other

Again, Wicked, whether we are talking about the book, musical, or movie, has always been explicitly focused on fascism — i.e., a project of ultranationalist state-building that relies on myth-making to try to return the nation to a hyper-idealized, unrealized time.

In the film, our fascist leader is the Wizard of Oz, a fraud from the “real world” who took advantage of local myth to build himself up as a savior figure. When our leads — Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), respectively — enter his capital, the Emerald City, we see this propaganda firsthand via the song One Short Day, where citizens praise him for allegedly saving Oz from misfortune. Most people view him as a reverential figure, even Elphaba, who initially aims to become his magical advisor (see The Wizard and I).

The Wizard, though, is a fraud who cannot cast the very magic he claims to have mastered. He instead uses cheap tricks and misdirections to maintain his power.

Yet, like any fascist, his project of ultranationalism doesn’t start and end with being charismatic. He has actively scapegoated the talking Animal population, using the public’s distrust of them following the Great Famine as a way to maintain order. As one professor lectures:

“There have been great changes throughout Oz with the rejection of animal culture. However, there was a time before you were born when life in Oz was different. When one could walk these halls and see a snow leopard solving an equation or an antelope explicating a sonnet. So when and why did this change?…[The Great Drought]. Food grew scarce and when people are hungry and angry, well, then they look for [someone to blame].”

From the film’s early moments, the viewer is shown the fallout from Oz’s backlash to animal culture. Sometimes, it is subtle. When Elphaba is born, all those in servant positions — from the maid bear Dulcibear (Sharon D. Clarke) to the Wolf Doctor (Jenna Boyd), who helps with the delivery — are animals. By the time we get to Elphaba’s young adulthood at Shiz University, her history teacher Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), a talking goat, has his chalkboard vandalized with the graffiti: Animals Should Be Seen Not Heard.

This fear of the “other” is a pervasive element of fascism. Scholar Umberto Eco, in his essay, Ur-Fascism, talked about how Fear of difference was a defining element of fascist governance, calling it an “appeal against the intruders” and “racist by definition.”

Eventually, Dr. Dillamond is sacked from the school, as animals are no longer permitted to teach. A new teacher enters the classroom and gives a demonstration of the “future,” where animals will be caged from such an early age that they never learn how to speak.

This fear of difference is not limited to a single minority group either but is more generalized. One of the reasons Elphaba becomes such a perfect scapegoat in the story is her green skin. People are disgusted by it. Whenever she enters a room, Elphaba is so used to people being reviled by the very sight of it that she defaults to explaining to strangers that she is not ill.

It was easy for the people of Oz to grow to hate her because they had already been trained to hate differences of any sort.

The subtext for this animosity is not subtle, especially since a Black actress plays Elphaba. We are supposed to link this hatred of a green-skinned person to our society’s systemic discrimination of Black and Brown people. Talking animals may be fictional, but our world has no shortage of scapegoated groups, and this reading opens the door to view animals as a stand-in for many different marginalized groups in US society, such as migrants, the unhoused, and, in my case, the transgender community.

Seeing Ozian society strip an entire group of people’s rights away, for me personally, makes it very hard not to think about trans people. From name changes to bathroom access to the right to gender-affirming care, various states are currently banning all sorts of gender expression, and that will most likely continue on the federal level this year.

We are headed to a very dark place. And if the road to hell is paved by good intentions, this film makes the case that the road to fascism is paved by people who look a lot like Glinda.

Fascism’s proponents

Elphaba’s relationship with Glinda or Galinda (she changed her name in faux solidarity with Dr. Dillamond) is the emotional core of this story, and it’s not a happy one. It’s not even shocking; in fact, it’s that lack of surprise that makes it so horrifying.

If I were to summarize Glinda’s arc, it would be a straight line, where she ends precisely where she started.

Glinda starts at Shiz University, powerful and privileged. There is a funny punchline where it's revealed that being denied the right to learn magic by the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), is the first time Glinda has not gotten her way. She doesn’t want to think too deeply about things. While love interest Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is lying to himself when he sings the lyric, “Nothing matters, but knowing nothing matters” in the song Dancing Through Life, Glinda seems to believe it because her circumstances have never had her need to question the status quo.

Everything in her life has been fine, and she doesn’t understand (or, more like, doesn’t want to understand) why that approach doesn’t work for everyone. The advice she gives to Elphaba in the fan-favorite song Popular reflects this outlook. The song essentially encourages assimilationism. She tells Elphaba to learn to dress in the right way and say the right things, and she, too, will be popular—as if marginalized people can smile and nod at their oppressors into solidarity.

Glinda never admits it directly, but she resents Elphaba. It frustrates her that Elphaba has lucked into the one thing she wants but cannot have, and Glinda bullies Elphaba for a large portion of the film. To the point where Elphaba’s only real friend for much of it is Dr. Dillamond.

In the film, Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship only begins to develop because Elphaba gives Glinda the thing she wants. She convinces the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible, to teach Glinda magic, and that kindness makes Glinda feel guilty enough to intervene in a humiliating situation on Elphaba’s behalf.

It’s not clear she would have still done this if Elphaba had not first convinced Madame Morrible to teach Glinda magic.

While the two become friends — replete with a makeover and everything — this dynamic does not change. Glinda is never willing to put aside her own self-interest to help others. When Elphaba asks her classmates if they will do anything after Dr. Dillamond is forcibly removed from class, Glinda remains in her seat. When both Elphaba and Glinda learn that the Wizard is a fraud imposing cultural genocide on talking animals, she spends her time trying to convince Elphaba not to defect.

Glinda’s arc in this first film is that she has the potential to change — to be something else, something better — and she chooses not to.

The truth is that fascism doesn’t hurt everyone. Umberto Eco described it as relying on a “selective populism” where “the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

The animals don’t benefit from Ozian fascism, but people like Glinda do.

It’s unsurprising that she decides not to help Elphaba in the struggle against Ozian fascism as she benefits from staying in line, but it’s still heartbreaking. One of the things that caused me to cry after leaving the theater was realizing how many Glindas there will be in my life over the next few years—people who care about me, people who even say they love me but aren’t willing to make that leap and do something about it.

Instead, they will not only step aside but, like Glinda, enforce the very things that hurt me.

I am seeing a lot of self-professed liberals and leftists looking at the 2024 election and concluding that the thing that caused them to lose was being too supportive of trans rights. Commentators and politicians are currently writing op-eds and giving interviews about how we should distance ourselves from the trans community — from people like me.

And this distancing — this abandoning of a small population to appeal to a far-right government — scares me because such a move tends to go poorly for the group being scapegoated.

And sadly, it’s as American as apple pie.

An American conclusion

It needs to be highlighted that within the film, Ozian fascism did not come from Oz but was directly imported from America. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) flew here to Oz on a balloon, and he tells Elphaba how he is merely copying what his leaders do back home:

“When I first got here, there was discord. There was discontent. And back where I come from [i.e. America], everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

There is something very peculiar about one of the biggest films in the world right now pointing to the ingrained problem of American fascism, and yet our country is still heading in that direction anyway. Our society recognizes the problem intellectually, but the moment things become about reality (and not merely just fiction), support for fighting fascism appears to wane.

It seems that my fellow Americans will accept one set of morals in the theater and another in real life, that we have more empathy for fictional talking animals on the Silver Screen than marginalized citizens like trans people in the United States.

So you see, this movie made me cry because something bad isn’t just happening in Oz.

Star Wars Has Been Struggling with the Slavery of Droids For A Long Time

Slavery has been a core theme in the Star Wars universe for a long time. Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd/Hayden Christensen) — the Jedi Knight who would betray the Jedi Order and become a key figure in the rise of the Galactic Empire — began his life as an enslaved person on the desert planet of Tatooine. His decision to leave behind his enslaved mother, Shmi (Pernilla August), to join the Jedi Order (and his inability to help her) is partly what drives him to the Dark Side.

Human slavery is framed as abhorrent in this universe (because it is in every universe). We empathize with Anakin and are meant to see his “owner,” a junk-dealing alien named Watto (Andy Secombe), as disgusting. Watto is a potbelly grifter, and our leads in The Phantom Menace (1999) have to outsmart him to get the spaceship part they need.

Likewise, Jabba the Hutt (played by Larry Ward and puppeteers Toby Philpott, Mike Edmonds, and David Barclay) is a prominent slaver and crime syndicate boss in the original series (see Return of the Jedi), and he is quite literally a giant worm guarded by walking pigs. We are meant to be sickened by his very presence and the institution of slavery he represents.

Yet this same empathy for organic enslaved persons has historically not been extended to droids in the Star Wars franchise (see Pop Culture Detective’s The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars), who are almost all owned by an organic. These characters are routinely portrayed as having emotions, pain, and desires, but they are also framed in the narratives as comedic punchlines or faceless villains.

Rarely are they given the actual agency of their human counterparts, even the ones who are likewise enslaved.

Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the company has been struggling with the implications of this issue. Multiple mainstream properties have grabbled with droid enslavement and personhood in a way that we haven’t seen before, and it might be too little, too late.

A beeping history

It’s well noted that one of the inspirations for the first Star Wars film is Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) — a Japanese samurai movie about two oafish peasants unknowingly guiding a general and a princess across enemy territory in exchange for gold.

Hidden Fortress’s influence on Star Wars particularly applies to the most famous characterization of droids in the Star Wars universe — C-P30 and R2-D2. They are partly based on the two peasants in the film, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), the comedic relief characters that bumble around as the general and princess characters do more serious work.

There is a classist framing here, as, throughout the film, the peasant’s greed causes them to constantly lose and retrieve the gold promised to them — the thing separating them from the nobles focused on more serious things. We are meant to see their antics as almost childish. After losing the gold a final time, the film ends with them ironically getting a single bar of gold as a reward. One, they are finally able to share after being commanded to do so by the princess.

It can be argued that this hierarchy between serfs and lords was recontextualized by Lucas in the Star Wars universe as between owner and droid.

As with the peasant-noble relationship in Hidden Fortress, we might be encouraged to feel or root for a droid helping its owner in a particular scene, but never enough to assess the deeply unfair status quo. C-3PO may quip about its unfair lot, and a Droid in Jabba’s Palace may scream out in pain after getting tortured, but at the end of the day, it’s not an injustice because they are not framed as persons.

Yet, this status quo has been slowly shifting. While there has been some mention of attempted droid autonomy in legacy books and short stories (such as Kevin J. Anderson’s Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88) in more popular pieces of media, we can trace the origin of this trend to the droid L3–37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in the much-maligned title Solo (2018).

Throughout this fictional biopic about how the smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) got his start, secondary robot protagonist L3–37 or L3 frames the oppression of droids as an injustice. As she says to another droid: “They are using you for entertainment. You’ve been neurowashed. Don’t just blindly follow the program. Exercise some free will!”

And yet, she is mocked for this sense of justice. In one example, her owner, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), asks her if L3–37 needs anything. She sarcastically quips, “Equal rights,” and Calrissian just sighs. L3–37 is ultimately framed as a social justice warrior who won’t stop complaining about her second-class status — and for some reason, that’s supposed to be annoying. Her narrative ends not with her freedom but with her consciousness being uploaded to the Millennium Falcon —her agency stripped away.

In Solo, the idea of droid autonomy is introduced unseriously, and that’s more or less where the series has remained until this year.

Another example of droid autonomy that feels underbaked is how C-3PO is treated in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), the last film in the most recent trilogy. A common practice in the Star Wars universe is for owners to erase the memories of their droids for both general maintenance and as a security measure. This effectively kills them, as their consciousness is erased and reverts to an earlier setting.

C-3PO willingly gets wiped to help his owners with plot shenanigans. He gives a passionate monologue about saying goodbye to his friends, and the film hardly skips a beat before our leads move on to the next thing. Protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley) is, in fact, overjoyed to learn mere seconds later that an organic she thought dead is alive.

C-3PO’s memory ultimately gets restored haphazardly by R2-D2, but it’s an earlier backup — he still died, even if it’s not framed that way in the text. It is also not really a moment of celebration among the organics like the rescue of other characters is.

Yet perhaps the best in-universe examination of this theme comes from the recent video game Star Wars: Outlaws (2024), which is unfortunate because the game is not very good. The theme of droid agency is explored directly with the character ND-5 (Jay Rincon). He is the partner-in-crime and handler of protagonist Kay Vess (Humberly González,) as she attempts to recruit a crew across the galaxy to pull a once-in-a-lifetime heist.

ND-5, a droid created for war, is aware of his lack of agency, and he’s not particularly thrilled about it, saying: “I was created to destroy. I didn’t concern myself with why. It can be difficult for organics to understand.”

He lacks free will on a fundamental level, and for a series so uncurious about the agency of artificial intelligence, it was almost surprising to see.

This theme is further highlighted in the final act of the game, when ND-5's owner, Jaylen Vrax (Eric Johnson), betrays Kay and forces ND-5 to fight her. Kay dodges ND-5’s laser fire behind crates and inside air ducts, but she never abandons him, making it her mission to free the droid from his restraining bolt (i.e., the technology that forces him to follow orders) and, consequently, from Jaylen Vrax’s control.

She succeeds with this objective and ends the game by calling ND-5 her family, a level of personhood that I haven’t seen in a lot of Star Wars media — one that hopefully opens the door for a possible shift in how this franchise frames droid personhood.

A robotic conclusion

The way I broke down Outlaws might make it sound like I think Star Wars has entered a progressive era with this issue, but I actually think it might be too little ground too late.

Examining the personhood of artificial life is one of the most basic themes in science fiction. It goes all the way back to the Golden Age with Isaac Asmiov’s The Robot Series (1940-95). Whether we are talking about Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) or the synthetic Geth in the Mass Effect series (2007–12), this is well-trodden ground at this point.

The fact that Star Wars is only getting to this now speaks to a level of stagnation with the property.

Furthermore, the way the personhood of these droids is framed by the affections and attachments of their human owners is paternalistic. Because Rey and Kay grow to like C-3PO or ND-5, these robots are framed emphatically. But the other droids in the series? They often get blasted to bits. These pieces of media are more about an individual narrative of chosen family rather than one of emancipation or demonizing the institution of droid slavery.

It’s not that I expect a full droid slave revolt in the next Disney+ show (though it can’t hurt), but it would be nice if, at the very least, the heroes we are supposed to like recognize that enslaving a sentient being is wrong. By nature of our leads being comfortable with this institution — it’s hard for me to like them.

The Star Wars galaxy may be far, far away, but its rejection of slavery shouldn’t be.

You Can Stop the Collapse of Democracy by Finding Your People

When Trump ascended to the presidency in 2016, there was a call to support existing institutions. John Oliver, on his show Last Week Tonight, urged viewers to donate to nonprofits such as Planned Parenthood and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as to subscribe to newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times (see Season 3, Episode 30: President-Elect Trump).

A lot of people did that: there was a considerable increase in newspaper subscriptions and philanthropic giving in 2016 (note: I am not suggesting John Oliver is singularly responsible for this). It was an across-the-board bump. Even groups on the left, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), had their membership swell. These institutions were supercharged as bulwarks to protect American democracy.

Yet here we are—Trump has once again ascended to power. All that stands in his administration’s way is an ineffectual Democratic Party, a nonprofit scene beholden primarily to wealthy donors, leftist influencers building up their brands, grassroots groups holding on by the skin of their teeth, and, god willing, Donald Trump’s own incompetence. It’s safe to say that this strategy of strengthening liberal institutionalism has failed us in stopping the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.

In the following weeks and years, many groups will sell you on the idea of joining their organizations, subscribing to their newsletter, and volunteering for their efforts to stop our slide into fascism, and I am here to urge caution before you do that. While joining a group is ultimately necessary (you can do more with others than alone), the most recent election has proved that the work of these groups does not lead to success.

We need to ensure that we do not funnel our money, and most importantly, our time, into the same ineffectual organizations, institutions, and groups that failed us the first time.

Don’t throw yourself at the first thing

When it comes to selecting an organization or group to support with your time, money, and reputation, impulse alone cannot be what seals the deal. The groups with the most appealing ad campaigns and the largest number of influencers online are rarely the ones with healthy and sustainable communities.

There are a lot of popular liberal and leftist groups that have had various leadership scandals. Several years ago, then-president Alphonso David of the Human Rights Campaign — a huge LGBT+ organization — had to resign in disgrace for allegedly helping former Governor Andrew Cuomo cover up a sexual harassment scandal. Sexual harassment scandals are sadly quite common among many center-left nonprofits and have affected everyone from Oxfam to the Humane Society.

However, it’s not a problem with just the center-left. For example, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has long dodged allegations of sexual harassment within its organization, including infamously the case surrounding the alleged sexual assault by member Steven Powers.

Be mindful of what kinds of leaders these groups are attracting.

Furthermore, even if their leadership is squeaky clean, every longstanding group has an approach that you may not entirely agree with. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) values all citizens being able to exercise their rights equally and therefore defends groups you may disagree with, such as authoritarian provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and even Donald Trump from his temporary Facebook ban. Some have accused the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of being too electorally-minded. Food Not Bombs tends to follow a methods-oriented approach over a top-down direction. Depending on your outlook, these approaches are either terribly inefficient or the best way to structure things.

What, if any, of these approaches appeal to you?

Again, it’s vital to research these groups before you hit that membership or donate button. Learning a baseline about how these groups operate is critical work that needs to be done before joining them.

Some helpful questions to ask:

• How do these groups make decisions?

• Do you agree with that structure?

• How can a knowledgeable insider take advantage of that structure?

• What have these groups’ mistakes been?

• How have these mistakes been rectified or buried?

Your donations, time, and efforts will be used by these groups in their next fundraising email or maybe even their leaders’ next escape from accountability. It’s better to start asking these questions before an inflection point is reached, not after.

Finding a community might take some work

Furthermore, you might have to accept that the group for you — the one that clicks everything into place — might not come up on a simple Google Search. It might not even have a website. Your people might not currently be coherently organized at all.

And so, how do you find these people? Or, how do you let yourself be found?

Paradoxically, I don’t think self-appointed political groups that put out “Stand Together” ads or have clipboards preaching about the “coming revolution” are what you should seek out. My political home — the radicals still with me and whom I call family — wasn’t found at an ideologically progressive or radical organization. I found it at a board game night and a writer’s group. These were communities built in between the cracks—places where queer nerds felt safe. Physical and sometimes virtual spaces where we talked about our traumas and baggage, and slowly, politics started to spring up. We would talk about what we wanted, which quickly morphed into what we should do.

Finding your people involves seeking out something similar, but not the same: a local fan group for an edgy, leftist musician, an online buy nothing page where people giveaway and ask for things in their local area for free, a Discord server about a comedian trolling people on the far right, a book club on radical politics, or an in-person trans support meeting at a coffee shop. Places where community, not just campaigns to pass specific policy, already exists, even if it’s tenuous — even if you might be needed to keep it going.

It’s these spaces you have to find because they will lead to more direct political action. The things you like and the spaces you seek out are not apolitical. When you find your people amongst the geeky video game conventions, local hiking groups, and punk concerts, you will quickly realize that many people who like the things you do happen to share some of your values.

These communities, especially ones linked to a particular geography, are not just consumer preferences but potential constituencies—groups with needs that many members may be willing to fight for.

Get together with these groups (preferably in person), and you will be amazed by what arises from it. You start chatting with your Star Wars nerds about some of the sexism they’ve experienced at a local con, and that conversation becomes the basis for a panel the following year. Your buddy complains about never having enough to eat, and your friends start putting on a local potluck. You gripe to your best friend about a leader you can’t stand, and out of that conversation, learn that an anti-ICE coop is protesting said leader and decide to go together.

Political actions should not be something you do alone, like some extracurricular activity, but actions you do with and evolve from your interactions with the people you respect and love.

An active conclusion

A lot of people take a policy-over-community approach. They put all their hopes into a policy they think will save them (e.g., Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, etc.) and hope that a community will evolve around it—a wonkish group of nerds that harangue politicians and key figures until the thing is passed.

Yet you build community—not by supporting a top-down policy that you’ve decided will work — but by joining and participating in it. You learn who your people are and what they need (preferably by having a f@cking conversation with them), and then do something about those needs.

It’s these communities—not a newspaper owned by a billionaire or a nonprofit funded by one—that need to be found, supported, and built over the next few years.

And you are vital to making that work happen.

‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Could Have Been Great

Image; EA

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) is the fourth title in the Dragon Age series, a standard grim dark fantasy world where elves are oppressed, magic is a loose metaphor for addiction, and religious oppression abounds. This latest outing stars the protagonist Rook, who is in charge of a team of specialists known as the Veilguard, trying to stop old Elven Gods from releasing a plague onto the world.

This game could have used an extra year or so to refine its various issues. Bugs were too common. I would notice that audio would not trigger for many moments, and I more than once fell through a wall or phased into a pillar, which forced me to reload a save file. The dialogue was famously clunky, especially its unskippable opening hours that set up the story.

These flaws (and more) led to a game that was middling in quality — not terrible, not great — just sort of okay.

It’s an unfortunate outcome because a good game is buried underneath all this blunder. Between the bugs and frustrating level design, there is a beautiful reflection on grief and regret, and I wanted to highlight those themes and focus on what could have been.

The good game beneath the surface

The first God the Veilguard is tasked with defeating is Solas, the elven God of Lies — at least according to the myth. He wants to tear down the Veil, a force dividing the material plane where elves, dwarves, and humans live, and the Fade, a magical land of memory and emotion. His destruction of the Veil would allow for spirits and demons from the Fade to flood into our world, killing many people in the process.

It’s an undesirable action but one that makes sense as you come to understand this God’s psychology. Solas is motivated, first and foremost, by regret. A long time ago, he organized an anti-slavery rebellion against the other elven Gods or Evanuris — petty warlords who passed themselves off as deities and used that standing to enslave their elven worshippers.

Solas constructed the Veil to imprison these Gods, and it, unfortunately, had devastating impacts on Elven society. Elves were heavily reliant on magic from the Fade, and when the Veil was put up, their cities crumbled, their immortality waned, and they became vulnerable to external threats. Humans usurped the remains of the Elven empire — their land colonized and stolen until all that was left of them was a migratory diaspora known as the Dales.

Solas blames himself for these events, and in tearing down the Veil, he wants to rewind history. As he tells your player character: “This world is broken, Rook, because of my mistakes.”

Do you see how compelling this motivation is?

The Veilguard was originally titled Dreadwolf, based on one of Solas’s many names, and I can see why: his emotional struggle is the core of this story. Throughout the Veilguard, your character has these back-and-forth quips with Solas in the Fade, and they were the most engaging element of the game for me. Whether learning his perspective about the Dalish or hearing out the rationalization for his plan to destroy the Veil, we come to understand him as someone whose pride prevents him from moving past his regret.

Yet regret motivates not just the Elvish God of Lies but also the other antagonists. When the Veilguard stops Solas from breaking down the Veil, two different Gods — Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain — are released into the world. They are motivated by this same emotional impulse. Their biggest regret is the collapse of their empire, and they are willing to unleash a plague (i.e., the blight) to recapture that old glory. “Every pointed spire,” Elgar’nan monologues, “and warding enchantment in this city is a child’s unwitting imitation of the empire I built. I would have restored the glory your lives are too brief to remember.”

Solas and the Evanuris are mirrors of one another. They both want to implement a reactionary plan that will risk the lives of millions in the process. The only difference is the time they wish to return to. Solas wants to turn the clock shortly after the Elvish rebellion won and the Evanuris before the rebellion existed.

What makes our heroes heroes is not the absence of regret — members of the Veilguard are also weighed down by unfinished relationships — but their ability to embrace their regrets and consequently process those feelings. A significant part of the plot involves helping your party move on from various types of psychological trauma so that they will be in a better position to kill the Gods.

One of the most direct examples involves the companion character, Bellara, an elf with an unfinished relationship with her brother. Her quest ends with his funeral, where you must guide her through metaphorical obstacles to grief.

Moments like this were moving, some even bringing me to tears, and it was disappointing that a game with such a mesmerizing theme was so buggy and incomplete.

A regretful conclusion

Now, many games (as well as most artworks) are just okay. A lot of video games are, at best, fun distractions and, at worst, jingoistic propaganda with predatory gambling mechanics.

There are plenty of games that are worse than Veilguard.

And yet, this game wasn’t trying to be mediocre. There was a serious attempt to grapple with themes of regret, revolution, and pride that are rare for a AAA title to discuss. Going into Veilguard, I was honestly worried that Solas would be just another revolutionary with “the right intentions” but “going too far.” And instead, we got a well-rounded villain with believable psychological motivations.

There is this sense that, with just a little bit more time, this game could have been great — and for a title about regret, that’s almost poetic.

‘Agatha All Along’ Is The Evil Queerness We’ve Been Waiting For

Image; Disney

I walked away, loving Agatha All Along (2024), the WandaVision (2021) spinoff about the evil witch named Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) who goes on an adventure with a begrudgingly formed coven on the “Witches’ Road” for glory and power.

I loved the set design and cinematography. The use of color theory was quite apt, as every character was linked to a particular color that was tied to the greater mythology of the show (i.e., yellow for divination magic, red for protection, blue for potions, and so forth). This pattern was so ingrained that an astute viewer could tell what challenge was next based on the color of the leaves on the Witches’ Road.

As a musical theater nerd, I also couldn’t help but love the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, which the show was centered on. It thematically resonated with the major themes of the series and was additionally quite catchy.

The figure I loved most of all, however, was the titular Agatha, who represents a prime example of what queer evil can look like in media, and I think she’s iconic.

Evil never sleeps

Agatha is, to sidestep the pun for a moment, an evil b!tch. She is unapologetic in her cruelty, having hurt an untold number of people — something she hilariously jokes about in the episode If I Can’t Reach You / Let My Song Teach You, saying: “I mean, I’ve killed…my share.”

And then we get to the last episode, and I think the twist here is clever because it subverts our expectations. Throughout the series, we are led to believe that Agatha has valid reasons for her duplicitousness. It is revealed earlier that she had a son who died, and the grief of that is what is implied to have propelled her toward evil.

In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see how these events happened. Her sick son, Nicholas Scratch (Abel Lysenko), died during childbirth, but because she had a love affair with death itself (Aubrey Plaza), she was given more time with him, but it’s implied at a cost. Every so often, Agatha and her son (who played the role of the bait) had to kill other witches so he could go on living.

Yet one day, he refused to play his part in the deal, and so death came to collect.

Normally, this is where a morally “righteous” show would end. We would learn here that Agatha was only doing this evil to protect her child. It’s this history where the story of her evil would be born, morphing into something more fiction than fact. It would be a reputation she, as a good woman, bore quietly, all in the name of preserving the conservative family structure, and in that way, we would be meant to empathize with and maybe even (eventually) forgive her.

It’s the same rationale we saw in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), where the grief Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) had for her lost lover and children was what propelled her to commit evil. She is circumstantially evil, and her “sins” are ultimately balanced out with a heroic enough sacrifice.

And yet, that’s not what happened in Agatha All Along. Her murderous rampage picks up after Nicholas’s death, not before.

On their murderous adventure together, Agatha and Billy invented the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road. It was something that they started to perform while traveling up and down America as part of the con to attract witches so that Agatha could kill.

After Nicholas’s death, The Ballad of the Witches’ Road had solidified as a piece of American folklore, and real witches started to pursue it. That’s when Agatha stepped in, offering guidance as the one witch who claimed to have gotten to the end of the road. It was all a con that Agatha pulled to absorb other witches’ powers (note: she has succubus-like powers that allow her to drain other witches if they attack her). And so, after performing the ballad to summon the Witches’ Road and failing (because it didn’t really exist), she would mock the aspirants until they attacked her.

In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see a chilling montage play as Agatha pulls this con throughout the ages. She has killed generations of witches, and there is no remorse there. Even the heroic sacrifice she makes in the penultimate episode to save the young witch Teen (Joe Locke) from Death isn’t really noble. “By the way,” she lectures Teen after becoming a ghost, “I did not sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk.”

Agatha is not redeemable and does not particularly want to be.

In many ways, this embrace of evil is refreshing. We are still living in the shadow of The Hay’s Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983), where narratives always had to have a morally clear message when dealing with “evil” characters.

When I think of many classic Disney Villains during the Code, particularly witches, they received unambiguous moral retributions: the Evil Queen (Don Brodie) falls to her death (see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) is slain by a prince (see Sleeping Beauty, 1959), and so forth. Even after both Codes were done away with, this legacy continued. The sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) is impaled by the bow of a ship (see The Little Mermaid, 1989). Voodoo priest Dr. Facilier (Keith David) is dragged to the other side (see Princess and the Frog, 2009).

Disney has started to reckon with this legacy. The Snow Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) is not killed for plunging the land of Arendelle into snowy darkness (Frozen, 2013), and even the abuela (María Cecilia Botero) in Encanto (201) receives a hug rather than a poetic death. Likewise, the sequel to Hocus Pocus made pains to distinguish between the bad witches of the original film and the good ones who are our protagonists.

It’s refreshing to likewise see that empathy extend to an evil queer like Agatha.

A witchy conclusion

As I wrote in the beginning, Agatha is an evil b!tch. She has always been evil, and we are not meant to think anything differently as the season comes to a close. She sees no problem in sacrificing her own kind to get ahead, and while that makes her despicable, I don’t want to return to the morality of the Hays Code, where all art must end in a certain way to underscore particular values.

Furthermore, there is something beautiful about queerness, not needing to bend itself to modern morality, and on a Disney show, no less.

We were the villains for so long — the serial killers, groomers, and deviants — because it was an archetype thrust upon us. And for a while, there was a concerted effort to only push for “positive” representation to counterbalance that trend. Tropes such as the “depraved bisexual” and the “promiscuous queer” were seen as damaging by some advocates because they were all we could be.

Yet queer people are people, and our media representation should be as diverse as our humanity. We should not just be heroes and sidekicks but killers (see Killing Eve), criminal masterminds (see Mr. Robot), and everything dark under the sun — our humanity centered each step of the way.

For while I would hate Agatha in real life, on the screen, she’s an evil I adore.

Queers Need To Realize That Elections Won’t Save Us

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

It’s heartbreaking when a terrible man ascends to power. Every time this happens, and it’s by no means a unique experience in America, we are reminded of just how horrible our system is. And when that man is the next leader of your country — a man who campaigned trampling on your very identity — a whole lot of people crash against that realization at the same time.

Trump will be president, and he didn’t need a coup d’état to get there. He didn’t have to encourage sheriffs to deputize half of America. He merely achieved it through the normal transition of power.

That’s been happening a lot recently, hasn’t it?

Trump. W. Bush. Reagan. Our system sure is electing people every few decades who reliably upend everything for the worse, and this time will be no different. Americans will have to fight against potential rollbacks to our bodily autonomy, our healthcare, and so much more.

As us queers reckon with all the work we will have to do to preserve and expand our rights, its comes time we face the fact that the current electoral strategy has failed us and that a bottoms-up approach is needed.

Elections take too much

Every time an election goes terribly (i.e., a conservative reactionary, and in this case, a fascist gains power), I see an effort to relitigate the specifics of the campaign. What could have been done differently? What voter outreach did XYZ politician miss? What political strategy or issue did the candidate, in retrospect, need to back away from or embrace?

In essence, what and who is to blame? Is it Russia? Leftists? Young people? Those against genocide? China? What group selfishly didn’t vote, and who should we have paid more attention to?

All of these critiques focus on the substance of a particular campaign rather than on the form of how we organize — i.e., an emphasis on short-term electoral campaigns and how to run them. After every defeat, we are encouraged to reroll the dice in two and four years’ time, hoping for better results. We have to vote harder. Donate more. That’s the proposed solution repeatedly, and it’s a failure.

I think that structurally, elections can be elitist (see my reasoning here), but even if you disagree with that point, it cannot be denied how big of a drain on resources they are. Every election cycle, billions are burned in spending on staffers and ads, with this year breaking records. Billions are now spent every year, even during non-presidential cycles.

More than just money, we overtax the people who are the backbone of such campaigns. Staffers and volunteers are thrown into a chaotic environment that will burn them out within a few months, not because of the results of the race but often because the work environments of campaigns are profoundly unhealthy. As Jesse M. writes of their involvement in the 2020 election cycle:

Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.

So much of our time and energy is spent on these short campaigns that will not connect to anything more significant once they are over. Maybe a candidate wins (a big if), and their volunteers and staff get a win under their belts, but often, that’s all it is. Those efforts translate into the individual advancements of a politician’s career, with no guarantee that they will even stand by what they campaigned on.

In fact, it’s often accepted wisdom at this point that many such promises are lies. You spend all of this energy on something and then send your efforts into the ether, hoping “your candidate” does the work they promised now that you, as a voter, have no leverage to make that happen.

It’s a backward approach to gaining power. You are spending resources upfront in the hope of getting “amenable enough” people so you can start building what you need. The supposed aim is to elect leaders who will pass legislation permitting us to make the systems of care we need to survive. And every election cycle, we keep volunteering and donating more and more to keep this gamble going, and it isn’t working.

I propose — and I am not the first to advance this today, let alone this century — that we work on building what we need, irrespective of who is in power.

That, first and foremost, we create, invest in, expand, and care for grassroots groups, mutual aid networks, defense leagues, community newspapers, and more that will allow us to build power in a decentralized way. Groups that stick around longer than a six-month campaign and whose growth will not impair our freedom if a terrible leader ever steps in.

One of the problems with the presidency (and many current executive positions) is that so much power is centralized around them that bad leadership is catastrophic. You lose the presidency once, setting you back a decade or more.

Trump is going to roll back a lot of rules and appoint a lot of judges, and that does not even get into the laws he’ll pass. Even in an ideal case where a person of your ideological persuasion wins (unlikely in my case), the momentum of the institutions the presidency governs cannot be halted and reversed quickly. It can take years to reverse a decision made by a bad presidency — if the moment ever comes at all.

That’s a lot of eggs to put in one proverbial basket.

In decentralized groups, that domino effect doesn’t happen as much. You pour resources into many groups, and if a bad leader arises (something that is inevitable), nothing is keeping you there. The group withers. Members leave and spin their efforts into different things — something that happens all the time. From the DSA to Black Lives Matter, many progressive and leftist projects owe their existence to a split (and maybe a merge and split again) from another organization.

This process of destruction and rebirth (of reacting to change) is healthy in movement-building. Change is unavoidable. It’s not a failure for people to remain committed activists under a different organization, group, collective, coop, or whatever the hell you want to call it.

And yet we have somehow gotten it in our heads that unserious people work on building long-term groups and communities, while serious people throw all their resources into short-term efforts that will not only cease to exist several months down the line but have to be continuously restarted anew in not much time at all.

It’s a kind of madness that needs to stop.

A conclusion

Queers are on the edge of society. We are poorer, and we are one of the more recent scapegoats fascist reactionaries are using to gain power. We can’t afford to wait to reroll the dice. We need things now, which means building things in the present, not continuously pointing to the hazy future of the next election.

There are so few activists out there, and even fewer are building community or, to extend my earlier metaphor, weaving new baskets. Most of us are being directed to drop all our eggs into the single, unwieldy basket of electoralism and then get upset when it breaks.

But it’s going to break because all things do.

The goal is to build so many different baskets that it doesn’t matter if one of them tears a sunder. To build mutual aid networks, to roll out strike funds, to found worker coops, to teach queer defense classes, to host regular potluck meals so your friends can eat, to take a shift at the community kitchen or garden (or make one if it doesn’t exist), to backup banned books and films, to begin scrutinizing your local businesses and politicians, to knock on your neighbors door and say hello, and all the little things you can do to build real community.

Communities that can vote in an election and exist long after it ends.

‘The Perfect Couple’ & The Long, Complicated History of Sex Work’s Depiction In Media

Image; Netflix

‘Rich people doing murders’ is a favorite topic of television. Whether talking about Revenge (2011–2015) or Big Little Lies (2017–2025), there is something intriguing about watching the wealthy grapple with murder (particularly their own), the one problem they cannot yet buy their way out of.

The Perfect Couple (2024) is a limited series that revels in the opulence of the Nantucket-summering Winbury family as they move about the world in bright pastels and refined perfection. The show’s theme song, Criminals by Meghan Trainor and J.bird, plays at the start of every episode, with the Winbury wedding party performing a perfectly choreographed flash dance to it.

Throughout the series, we are meant to question the ‘perfect’ facade this family puts on and take a visceral pleasure as it crumbles.

It was a surprise when sex work became such a central element of the show, especially when it was not an object of mockery but of strength for one of the main characters. It’s this (mostly) positive portrayal that I want to talk about today as we contextualize it into a bitter and evolving history of sex work on the Silver Screen.

A brief recap of sex work’s portrayal in film and TV

Sex work (i.e., one’s sale of sexual, intimate, and often emotional labor for direct material compensation) has a contentious place in US society. It remains primarily illegal, and “wh*re” or “pr*stitute” are derogatory labels spoken all over this country as insults.

For the longest time, we saw this disdain reflected in how sex work was portrayed in media. The Hays Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983) prohibited the positive portrayal of sex work, as well as any sexual and romantic relationships that deviated from the mononormative, heterosexist norm.

An excellent example of this fact is the Great American Classic Baby Face (1933), which was actually released the year before the Hays Code’s proper implementation in 1934. The film stars Golden Age actress Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, the daughter of a speakeasy owner who engages in sex work during the Prohibition. Following her father’s death, she is encouraged by a mentor to “use” the men around her. She moves to the Big City and sleeps her way to the top of a bank called Gotham Trust Building. The original ending has Lily Powers more or less get away with this behavior. Her current partner, bank president Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), attempts suicide after she refuses to return money to him, and there is no narrative comeuppance.

Yet as the film started to get censored all over the country — alongside more general calls for the government to intervene in Hollywood’s “degeneracy” — its producer, Warner Bros., hastily reshot it so that Lily loses everything alongside her husband. There is a scene, tacked on at the end, where the bank’s board members discuss how Lily and her man have paid their debt to the bank and are now penniless.

This requirement that “degenerate” behavior (like sex work was believed to be at the time) never be validated in the narrative persisted for decades (see also Waterloo Bridge (1940), Streets of Shame (1956), Irma La Douce (1963), etc.).

Even after the Hays Code was done away with, the demonization of sex work remained a constant in film and television.

In particular, the “Disposable Sex Worker” trope — where a sex worker is killed to highlight the depravity of a specific character, environment, or event — has been the go-to for a lot of action and horror movies for over the last half a century. Whether we are talking about Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) murdering sex workers in American Psycho (2000) or Catherine (Julianne Moore) pushing the eponymous Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) out a window in the 2009 film of the same name, this trope has been criticized for framing sex workers as disposable.

This trope’s sister is the “Heart of Gold” trope, where sex workers such as Vivian (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman (1990) and Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) in The Equalizer (2014) are just so nice and kind that they give money away for free and provide emotional labor for seemingly random strangers.

Both of these tropes have long been criticized as dehumanizing because they strip the character in question of three-dimensionality. The sex worker is either unneeded, as with the Disposable Sex Worker Trope, or living in the service of another. As the artist and former sex worker Andrea Werhun told the CBC about sex work’s typical depiction in media:

“We’re victims, were villains, we’re dead, we’ve got hearts of gold. These are such shallow depictions that flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people.”

I am not going to pretend that these tropes have gone away. I was recently watching the premiere of the second season of Schmigadoon (2021–2023), and the inciting incident revolves around a burlesque dancer’s murder. It takes a long time for problematic norms to die, and we are in the middle of that process for some of these tropes, not the end.

Yet more positive ones have certainly come to the forefront in recent years as society’s empathy with sex work has started to widen, in no small part due to the work of activists who have pushed for its acceptance. The film Anora (2024) has been praised for its humanizing portrayal as acts of everyday mundaneity are shown alongside the sex work. The escort Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) in The Menu (2022) is the only person who walks away from that horror film alive after using her working-class roots to convince antagonist Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) to let her go.

It is this thread that The Perfect Couple falls into, providing us a glimpse into a sex worker who is neither disposable nor warm-and-cuddly.

The Perfect Couple

We learn that Winbury matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman) was a sex worker during a reveal in the final episode of the season. She has had enough of the secrets and confesses:

“Your father and I didn’t meet in a gallery opening. We met in a bar…I was an escort…I had sex with men for money. My brother organized the clientele, and your father was one of those men.”

When juxtaposing the “disposable” and “heart of gold” sex worker tropes, a hierarchy often arises in these media depictions between people “working the streets” and “high-end” escorts who are believed to have closer contact with the rich and powerful and consequently in some ways redeemable. The latter women are the ones more likely to be “saved” from the profession, or so the logic of these tropes usually goes.

Yet something interesting has happened in The Perfect Couple — Greer was “saved.” She married a rich man, Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), and leveraged that to become a successful author, but it didn’t change her dynamic in the relationship. Tag still treats her as if she were someone working for him. His family lost a lot of their wealth in what one character facetiously calls a “classic American tragedy.” Yet Tag spends his spare time taking drugs and having affairs with other women, while Greer is the one we are told rather explicitly is paying for everything.

She’s still working for the same client.

Furthermore, Tag is seemingly in control of the finances. When his son, Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor), needs money to stave off a terrible cryptocurrency investment, he goes to Tag for a loan despite his father having no actual competency in making money. This makes the financial advice he gives Thomas when he refuses the loan — i.e., that Thomas should “know” if his investments will perform— so chilling because you can argue he’s referring to Greer. She’s the investment he knew would perform.

This control he has is confusing before the reveal, and it’s only afterward that we learn that Tag has been subtly threatening Greer throughout the entire series. The insults he throws at her, such as “colorful” and a “workhorse,” are microaggressions reminding her of her past to put so he can her in “her place.”

It’s only after she comes forward about her past that Greer can sever ties with a man who, in retrospect, was emotionally abusive, and even as it’s happening, he still can’t believe it. “It never occurred to me,” he laments as he hands over the divorce papers, “not even once, that you might actually leave me.”

Greer receives her “happy ending,” not because a man saved her but because she separated from that man.

A satisfying conclusion

We can look at The Perfect Couple as a refutation of the trope of “a sex worker being saved by a client.” While she may have financially benefited from the background the Winbury name gave her, it was far from a happily ever after. He trapped her in an emotionally abusive relationship that took her a lifetime to untangle herself from.

I have some minor nitpicks about this series. From a certain lens, framing Greer’s reveal as a sex worker as shedding her “perfect persona” can be viewed by some as condescending. I understand that it was a source of shame for her because of the abuse she experienced — abuse necessary to subvert the happily ever after trope — but some may still be unsettled by this framing, and I am not here to dissipate that tension.

Yet overall, the show feels like an okay indicator of the state of representation surrounding sex work. Over the past few years, there have been materially negative developments in the US over the legalization of sex work, so it’s nice to see that, at least onscreen, our societal outlook on it continues to shift for the better.

I’m Begging You: Stop Using Algorithmic Feeds To Get Your News

Photo by Aaron Weiss on Unsplash

It’s so easy to get lost in a media feed. Hours can go swiping through videos on TikTok, Instagram’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts, and the many other “quick” feeds out there. “I have a problem with TikTok,” one Reddit user laments. “I’m spending upwards of 4, sometimes 5 hours a day just watching videos on TikTok.” “I have an addiction to TikTok, and the reason that I am worried about it is that it is lowering my attention span,” goes another.

These feeds are not just where we get fun distractions, but they are increasingly where we get our news. According to a Pew Research analysis released in 2024: “little more than half (54%) [of Americans] at least sometimes get news from social media.”We have gotten so accustomed to getting our information through these platforms, and yet they come with a ton of drawbacks that reduce our attention span and executive functioning, as well as make it more likely we internalize and spread misinformation.

And maybe we should all put more effort into curating our news feeds from particular sources rather than letting unaccountable algorithms do that labor for us.

The drawbacks of feeds

Most social media feeds like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and your Facebook Timeline are a sludge of misinformation where claim after claim is delivered at such a rapid pace that it becomes difficult to know if a fact is accurate at the moment, especially since this information takes advantage of human psychology to abet that spread. As scholar Kim Bisheff told Cal Poly News:

“Generally, misinformation is designed to tap into our emotional reactions: fear and anger, most frequently. We humans have this design flaw where, when we experience strong emotions — especially fear and anger — or in some cases, that feeling of validation that comes with having your opinions restated in an inflammatory way, we tend to react to that information without giving it much critical thought.”

I remember recently I saw a flood of misinformation when news of the Sean “Diddy” Combs sexual assault scandal began to circulate. A music video showed up on my feed (allegedly sung by Justin Bieber) implying he had been an SA victim of Diddy’s. The video had the lyrics: “Lost myself at a Diddy party, didn’t know that’s how it go. I was in it for a new Ferrari, but it cost me way more than my soul.”

I initially believed this claim because it was within the realm of possibility (SA in the entertainment industry is not uncommon). This information emotionally felt real to me, and that reality bypassed my ability to assess its accuracy. I started sharing the information with my partner and would have done so with more people, but on a whim, I started fact-checking it and learned that, no, this song was fake.

Justin Bieber never released the song “Lost Myself at a Diddy Party.”

Thankfully, the retraction I had to do was only with one person, but it’s not the first time something like this has happened (see Is “Occupy Democrats” Fake News?). I research on the Internet for a living, and misinformation still falls through the cracks, and it usually comes from feeds, which do not incentivize fact-checking.

With the Bieber-Diddy example, it took me five minutes to fact-check one five-second video. The average TikTok user, for example, watches almost an hour of such content every day, which could translate to a hundred or more videos a user would have to verify in a similar manner, meaning that to avoid misinformation, you properly would spend more time fact-checking feeds than consuming them.

That is too high of a hurdle to expect any user to meet. These platforms are not set up for users to pause, reflect, and deconstruct the news they absorb. You merely keep on consuming point after point, regardless of its accuracy, and that is by design.

A harmfully addictive design

There has been a consistent body of research that shows excessive screen time can have drawbacks, especially for children, most of whom now consistently use screens from infancy.

• A longitudinal study found that those exposed to television from 29 months onward (i.e., +2.4 years) saw decreased classroom engagement.

• Another noted that adolescents who used media to multitask were more likely to struggle with some aspects of executive functioning in their everyday lives. Something that is likely linked to academic performance.

• One National Institutes of Health-funded study led by Betty R. Vohr, M.D. found that six and seven-year-olds born “extremely preterm” and had more than two hours of screen time a day “were more likely to have deficits in overall IQ, executive functioning (problem-solving skills), impulse control and attention.”

• A scoping review indicates that screen time from an early age can “have negative effects on language development.”

• (Note: for this list, I used the background section for the article, Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Child Development: An Updated Review and Strategies for Management)

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that children under 18 months (1.5 years) have no screen time at all, and children from two to five limit it to one hour a day — advice that, if listened to, might mitigate some of these effects — but that’s by in large not happening. Children under one-years-old are, on average, watching almost an hour of screen time daily.

And, of course, the reason so many people, including children, are hooked to their screens — irrespective of the negative drawbacks — is because they are designed to do that. It’s well-documented at this point that tech companies have purposefully taken advantage of human psychology to manipulate our preferences (see “Persuasive Design”). Netflix even has an Emmy-winning documentary on the matter (see The Social Dilemma).

When talking about this subject, I always refer to the book Hooked by Nir Eyal, a popular read amongst the founders of Web 2.0, that laid out how companies could create products that are psychologically addictive. As Eyal writes in that book:

“Once we’re hooked, using these products does not always require an explicit call to action. Instead, they rely upon our automatic responses to feelings that precipitate the desired behavior. Products that attach to these internal triggers provide users with quick relief. Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.”

This sure sounds like instructions on how to psychologically addict one’s users, and it is advice a lot of people took to heart. Most feeds are now designed to generate these internal triggers where you feel compelled to return to them again and again, unprompted.

And that’s where my concern comes from regarding using such feeds to get your news. These platforms are designed to be addicting, not accurate, which means misinformation is an integral part of the social media experience.

An unsocial conclusion

Now, I am not a scientist, so I encourage you to read up on all the information I have cited (and correct what you think is erroneous as I do make edits).

What I have read alarms me. Feeds have an element of danger to them. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s impossible to verify all the claims coming at such a speed, and I think it’s a mistake to believe that an individual can overpower these hurdles through willpower alone.

None of us are immune to propaganda and misinformation.

No algorithmic feed should be your default source for news. I think the healthiest thing is to create your own RSS feed (Cory Doctorow recently evangelized about this on their blog). Gather a list of trusted sources, and when they do you wrong, drop them. While even here, there will be limitations — we cannot singularly overcome the hurdles of predatory information ecosystems — we should at least try.

Otherwise, we dictate our preferences to the whims of a feed.

‘Foundation’ Season 2 Is A Conversation About Belief and Faith

Image; Apple

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, particularly his first three books, was an anthology about a dissident scholar named Hari Seldon using an emergent theory of mathematics called psychohistory to predict the fall of the current Galactic Empire. Hari uses this foresight to establish a countermeasure, the Foundation, that will stave off the chaos of collapse and bring stability to the galaxy. The books are more or less about the first 200 years of that polity’s history as it struggles to meet this objective.

And so Apple+ had the challenge of adapting a series of short stories and novellas spanning across time, place, and characters and trying to make them into one cohesive narrative — at least if it wanted to follow the conventions of popular storytelling.

What came out of this attempt was a narrative not about science triumphing over ignorance but a battle of faith. Hari Seldon’s psychohistory is depicted in religious terms, waging a war of belief against the dogmas of the Empire and other emergent factions (note: YouTuber Just Write has an excellent breakdown of the religious themes in the first season).

The second season doubles down on this theme, and it’s better for it. We not only get better writing and direction this season but also have a more nuanced exploration surrounding faith and belief.

A conversation surrounding faith

From my perspective, the thesis for the entire season is articulated in the episode Why the Gods Made Wine. Scientism High Claric Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir) is talking to Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland) about how she has more resolve in the religion than him, saying:

“I'm not sure what I’ve been clinging on to all these years is faith…When Hari Seldon walked out of the vault, I saw him with my own eyes. All of us there, we had proof. But you and your generation, you only had second or thirdhand accounts to go by. Folklore. That's the difference between belief and faith. I believed what I saw, but faith is a bigger commitment.”

It’s this tension between faith and belief that we see highlighted again and again on the show.

For example, the Empire certainly has belief in its power because its technological and military superiority allows it to do whatever it pleases. The rulers of the Empire — i.e., the three clones of Cleon I, named Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Day (Lee Pace), and Dusk (Terrence Mann), and collectively and individually referred to as Empire — are confident in their abilities because when they act, planets are bombed into oblivion, territorial borders are remade, and grand megaprojects are built.

They can see it with their eyes.

Last season, Day punished a dissident, not by killing her, but by tracking everyone she ever had contact with and then wiping them from existence (see episode The Leap). These people feel they can do whatever they want — at least to a point.

Yet its leaders don’t appear to have faith in the Empire on a spiritual level, as defined by High Claric Poly Verisof. This season, we learn that Empire (i.e., Dawn, Day, and Dusk) have all been programmed to follow a path they cannot deviate from. Cleon rather maliciously ensured that their memories were constantly being edited for compliance, and if they ever stepped out of line, a new version of them was “decanted” so that his original vision continued.

Cleon’s vision is overseen by Empire’s robotic majordomo Demerzel (Laura Birn ), who is programmed to uphold the Empire above all else. She has no control over this directive; in fact, even her emotional reality is dedicated by it. She is the definition of an object whose belief in the Empire is programmed, not cultivated.

Even the Empire’s subordinates follow more out of fear of what the Empire will do over any intrinsic good they believe it will generate. There is one General in season two named Bel Riose (Ben Daniels), and he states explicitly he’s serving Empire out of fear. He tells his lover: “The emperor’s subjects, all these trillions of people, they’re just…disposable to him. So, as the one man who isn’t, it’s my duty to protect them.”

However, as the conversation between High Claric Poly Verisof and Brother Constant highlights, the Foundation seems to have both faith and belief, and the key to the latter is that it’s rooted in a real thing. Psychohistory, at least in the context of the show, is real. The “miracles” delivered by the Foundation are nothing more than dressed-up science. As High Claric Poly Verisof preaches to Empire: “The Galactic Spirit isn’t supernatural. It’s just progress.”

One can argue that the difference between the Empire and the Foundation, and therefore the difference between belief and faith, is force. These two entities both have a longstanding vision for the future that requires intergenerational buy-in, but one requires browbeating all dissidents into compliance, and the other literally shows its math. All the people who work for the Foundation are theoretically convinced to do so through reasoning, not because of a gun that hangs over their collective heads.

It’s that distinction that, paradoxically, leads to blind faith.

A faithful conclusion

In the show, when Hari Seldon was a little boy, he mapped out the migratory patterns of a local species on his home planet with near certainty. He then walked into that herd and stood where his calculations told him he would be safe. He believed in his math and was willing to die for it—something he would ultimately do in his pursuit of psychohistory (kind of).

The math behind psychohistory is fictional, and on a meta-level, I disagree with its underlining assumptions, which is a tangent for a whole other time. Still, I do believe (pun very much intended) that material proof can lead to faith.

In many ways, this is the story of science. A layperson does not necessarily understand the math behind astrophysics or quantum mechanics, but what makes the system of science work (at least so far) is the knowledge that one could, if given enough time. The difference between you and an expert is information and nothing more, and with that can come a certainty of conviction. We currently live in a time where laypersons all over this country have “Science Is Real” signs in their front yards, committed to an ideal of science, even as the comprehension of day-to-day science is beyond them.

That’s an interesting tension being highlighted in this show. It’s so easy to view science and faith as separate entities, but whether on the world of Terminus or the Earth of here and now, sometimes they can very much intersect.